While operators in countries like the US have made a huge success of the contract model, in India the large number of pre-paid users, who like to shift operators and change handsets frequently, have put-off telcos from subsidising phones until now.
RCom’s offer, therefore, comes as a huge surprise and has become a big hit on day one with the company seeing unprecedented demand for the Apple product.
I don’t agree because we are not offering any subsidy. If you do the calculation, you will see that this is profitable for me. This will expand the market for premium smartphones, which in turn will mean committed higher average revenue per user for RCom.
There are concerns that RCom does not have the network to support the unlimited data. Are you boosting your capacities?
We have a superior 3G network compared to other operators. We are confident of meeting the demand and making it a good experience for users.
Can such an offer trigger fierce competition that can kill the Internet market even before it takes off?
In fact, what are doing is to make smartphones and Internet affordable. In India, there are only 143 million Internet users of which 86 million are on 2G and 22 million on 3G. There are 60 million casual users who use Internet once in a while. This means that only 20 per cent of the overall market is on 2G Internet and 6 per cent on 3G. We will be doing injustice if we do not move towards making mobile Internet accessible to all.
What targets have you set for yourself in terms of number of subscribers ?
Everyone with a credit card is our target. We want to corner a substantial part of that market. Our effort is to make a premium product like Apple within the reach of consumers. We want to take leadership in the data market. With this bundled scheme, we hope to drive the smartphone market from an open market to a controlled one. We are confident of achieving our stated objective of 40 per cent share of the incremental smartphone market in our thirteen 3G circles.