The IAMAI-IMRB Mobile VAS Report

IAMAI and IMRB have released a report on Mobile Value Added Services in India. For the report, they referred to secondary data from industry associations and published reports, and also interviewed representatives of Telcos, Content Aggregators, Platform Enablers, Short Code Owners and industry experts. The findings:
– Mobile VAS in India at Rs.2850crore. Ringtones and Ringback Tones at Rs.1026 crore, Games and Data at Rs.171 crore, (edit: ) P2P SMS at Rs.1140 crore, P2A & A2P at Rs.428 crores, and others at Rs.86 crore. VAS is expected to grow at 60% to touch Rs.4560 at end 2007
– Revenue share for content (apart from P2P SMS): Telcos (60%), Aggregator/Developer (25%), Copyright Owner (15%).
– ARPUs and declined rapidly, and prepaid is around 80% of the market. Churn is high, and the need for additional services to prevent churn, as well as increase revenue streams will lead to an increase in VAS.
– Entertainment content and SMS contests are driving growth in VAS
They’ve also analysed the consumer demand and the value chain. There’s a fairly comprehensive list of challenges facing the VAS industry: Focus limited to youth and entertainment, piracy of content, lack of infrastructure, preference for low feature handsets, high cost to end user, transparency in revenue sharing, underdeveloped WAP market and spam.
They also believe that content aggregators will grow in promience over telcos, and the revenue share will shift in favour of the aggregators in the value chain. Regional content will drive growth and GPRS will pick up.

I don’t think it will be easy for the telcos to give up revenue share – they own the pipeline, and a lot of money is expected to be pumped into infrastructure (and spectrum) for 3G. The operators will expect their pound of flesh. At the same time, returns from 3G services will depend on VAS and not voice.

Download the “Mobile Value Added Services in India” report here (pdf).

The IAMAI-IMRB

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