Telecom giant Bharti Airtel has managed to declare a profit but its results show a real problem in even the top line. This underscores the need for these market leaders to find other ways to monetise customers. The plain vanilla voice market is no longer profitable, but these companies haven’t done much by way of value added services apart from the caller tunes, which is now an old story.
So far, however, the telephone service providers haven’t not come up with too much innovation and it is others who are doing this. Nokia’s Ovi stores, for example, now offer GPS map services for free in order to encourage users to buy Nokia phones instead of Blackberries. We need to see solutions like this from the Bhartis and Vodafones. These companies have not even tried to offer Photon-type high-speed internet cards, once again showing a lack of ability to move from the beaten path.
Sanjay Joshi, New Delhi
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