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Bharti Airtel’s video content for Re 1, introduced in April 2013, followed by other data-oriented services through the virtual Re 1 Entertainment Store, were successful in attracting first-time data users, especially from rural and semi-urban markets, as well as non-smartphone users. In 2013-14, the company’s mobile data user base jumped to 58.1 million, growth of 33.5per cent compared with 43.5 million a year earlier. During the year, revenue from mobile data jumped 96.3 per cent to Rs 6,320 crore.
The Re 1 Entertainment Store offers music, video games, photos and internet browsing packages for Re 1, or 3 MB data for Re 1 a day to access Facebook, Yahoo! Mail, Twitter and LinkedIn. “The rationale of the store simplification of data was stepping away from gigabytes and megabytes, getting first-time users to try, massification of data, getting them into ‘snacking’ behaviour, making it as affordable as Re 1, getting the aware to use more,” Bharti Airtel said.
The store offers more than 30,000 videos that can be watched on all mobile platforms (GPRS, 2G or 3G), across all mobile devices. Of the 26 million unique users of its Re 1 Entertainment Store, about 20 per cent are first-time mobile entertainment users, Bharti Airtel says. “Even if we are able to convert one per cent of these users to regular data users, that is huge,” said a senior company executive.
The company says 53 per cent of the users of the Entertainment Store are from rural areas; 65 per cent are feature phone users who primarily buy videos, music and games. The company sold more than a million internet packets for social networking and news websites between September and December 2013. Among other things, the Re 1 sachet model helped the company increase average revenue from each data user to Rs 79 at the end of March 2014 from Rs 55 at the end of March 2013. Consumption of data increased to 277 MB in March 2014 from 177 MB a year earlier. As of March this year, the company had 10.98 million 3G users.
The Bharti Airtel executive quoted earlier said the company hoped mobile internet would account for about 20 per cent of the total service revenue through the next two years, against the current 10-11 per cent. “The Re 1 model and the Entertainment Store helped us get new users. However, graduation of these one-time users to regular users is not easy. It will take time to create demand from them. Conversion of even one per cent is huge,” the executive said. He added the average monthly data usage of one GB per user was huge.
According to Airtel, about 65 per cent of Re 1 video download customers consumed one-five MB of data for each video. Currently, companies offer one GB of data for Re 125 a month, or one MB of data for 12.2 paise, for monthly pack users. Considering a video accounts for five MB of data, a consumer pays 39 paise more for a video through the Re 1 pack, compared to monthly data pack users.
There were plans for one paise per 10 KB of data, or Re 1.02 an MB, but this made sense for first-time users alone, said analysts. “Consumers will not mind paying extra, as there is no monthly commitment. And, the user profile is different. These people are unlikely to go for monthly data plans,” said an analyst with a management consulting firm.
In March this year, Uninor had launched low-cost sachet internet plans — 50 paise an hour to Re 15 a month for Facebook, and Re 1 a day to Re 15 a month for WhatsApp. In April 2013, Vodafone India had introduced ‘One-Time Trial Packs’ at Rs 25 for 2G and Rs 49 for 3G, offering customers 500 MB of data with a validity of seven days.
While Aircel has pocket internet plans at Rs 24, with a validity of 30 days, Idea Cellular has different data trial packs for different telecom zones, at Rs 5 packs for 30 MB of 2G data for a day to Rs 25 trail packs for 250 MB data for seven days. Sistema Shyam Teleservices, too, has data plans priced as low as Rs 5 (for eight MB of usage, with single-day validity).
