Value add for the next billion customers

As mobile penetration deepens in emerging markets to reach customers at the lowest socioeconomic level, the value added services (VAS) that will be attractive to this segment and how they will be used will be very different to how more affluent consumers have in the past. Working with 100 operators in 70 countries across Middle East, Africa, South East Asia and India, Bharti Telesoft’s CEO, Manoranjan ‘Mao’ Mohapatra shares with Michelle Mills his insight and experience into the challenges and special requirements in providing content to the next billion mobile customers

In India, we have about 30 per cent teledensity. As operators try to increase that towards 60 per cent, they are reaching out to a segment of the population that requires services that are not language dependent. Operators cannot assume that a user has the ability to read and write any more,” Mohapatra asserts.

Therefore, Bharti Telesoft is delivering services for operators such as voice SMS, interactive voice response (IVR) and speech recognition in answer to a growing customer base of which many are illiterate.

Another area that is seeing growth is the provision of prepaid recharge of any denomination, including very small amounts. In countries like Bangladesh and India, monthly revenue per user may only be a few dollars, so a minimum recharge amount of US$10 may even be prohibitive to the lower-income segment. Bharti Telesoft has been successful with its next generation PreTUPS prepaid solution, which allows customers to top up their accounts with any amount, and in December, the company announced it had launched this service with its 25th operator customer.

“Anybody can build a system that can handle large denominations. For example, if you recharge US$10, the cost of that transaction is 10 cents, or one per cent. But the key question in emerging markets is – can you afford lower transactions? As low as 25 cents? That means that your pertransaction cost has to be an insignificant percentage of 25 cents. Our system is capable of delivering low amounts of recharge at significantly lower pertransaction costs,” Mohapatra contends.

He states that a Bangladeshi operator that employed the PreTUPS solution and allowed very small recharge transactions was soon handling eight million recharge transactions per day. “I’m told that this is the largest number of recharge transactions anywhere in the world outside China,” he adds.

Another trend Mohapatra sees developing is where operators request services such as messaging platforms, mCommerce, recharge services or mobile content, but in a managed services model. Operators are flocking to content aggregators like Bharti Telesoft, not just to provide the content, but to host it and run it for them as well.

Bharti Telesoft is expecting annual revenues of approximately US$70 million in 2008. Headquartered in New Delhi, the company has a sales and support office in Johannesburg, with representative offices in Nairobi, Accra, Dubai, Amman and Cairo, serving clients such as MTN, Zain, STC, Batelco and Du.

The VAS provider’s latest offering includes the ‘Zing’ mobile browser that was launched in Cape Town in November, and which the company believes will drive mobile Internet usage and data revenues, through a simplified browser experience that works on entry-level handsets, as well as the latest model smartphones.

The company also launched its ‘Musica’ service in Q408, which allows subscribers to listen to their choice of music, downloaded from the Internet, for as little as a few dollars per month.

“Even a US$100 handset today is as good as an iPod when it comes to MP3-playing capabilities. With Musica, you can select the songs you would like to listen to on your phone like you would with an iPod, but the music is downloaded from the web to your mobile phone, and you can share it with your friends.”