EMOBILE: the mobile broadband revolutionist - Huawei

VOICE
FROM OPERATORS
Bharti Airtel continues to lead the market, and our leadership is
due to our commitment to affordability for Indian customers. Offering worldclass,
innovative and world’s most affordable tariffs at 1.5 cents/minute, we have
achieved more than 33% of the regular GSM market share in India.
governor and quality control inspector. By partnering with
strong global partners, Bharti Airtel is able to successfully
develop and focus on the core competence.
Product innovation
Production innovation is a delightful journey which
has allowed Bharti Airtel to win the hearts of millions
of Indian customers. Bharti Airtel comes out with new
ideas and new products every month. Although some new
customers don’t use them, customers like to feel that the
brand image of Bharti Airtel is innovative and really brings
new ideas every day.
Examples include the Micro Prepaid. We started it
in 2004, and now all our million plus retailers offer this
service. Through e-charging, low-educated or even illiterate
retailers can use e-charging instead of a paper recharge
card. This is a very good innovation that customers are
delighted with because they can buy talk-time near their
offices or at home. Retailers are happy because they don’t
have to keep a large inventory on hand. Money is all kept
on the phone, which is fantastic. More than USD5 billion
in transactions happen on this system every year.
Another example is Lifetime Prepaid which we
launched about two-and-half years ago. With the Easy
Lifetime, a customer can stay mobile for his entire life by
paying just about USD2 per month. Easy Lifetime is an
unprecedented move in the Indian telecom sector. If you
ask an Indian customer today which product he/she will
buy, they will invariably say, “I will buy Lifetime Prepaid
from Bharti Airtel.” Lifetime has lots of benefits for the
millions of customers who are using it every month.
On the content side, Indian people are really passionate
about music, Bollywood, games and a lot of other content.
We have been very innovative in this field and we believe
that if we give more such exciting content to our customers
that they use, it will keep them loyal to the brand.
With all these products launched, including Hello
Tunes, Music on Demand, Easy Music, and Song Catcher
where you can get somebody else’s ring back tones, Bharti
Airtel has become the largest music company in India.
We are not a music company, but by being a telecom
company, we are the largest music company, because the
volume of downloaded music is the highest in India and
more than any other music company.
Innovation for the future
We see the future very differently. We feel that in the
future, technology will give us speed. The service providers
have to aggregate. Customers do not want to go to many
brands, customers want to have one brand which they
like, and hence service providers have to aggregate and
make it simple. Customers clearly want affordability and
the differences between customers will vanish. If you
move ahead, some customers want to use more music or
data. The rural market is opening up, while the industry is
seeing lots of convergence, including media, telecom, and
the Internet.
Exploiting rural and youth opportunities
On the rural side, we are doing a lot of work at 400
thousand villages in India. We are helping the farmers in
India to get commodity prices, agricultural information
and agricultural help lines for buying fertilizer and
pesticide. We also help them to learn English. We are
helping the fertilizer co-operative reach the farmers. About
55 million farmers are going digital, including doctors
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Win-Win / FEB 2009