Mobile in India

1. Subscribers: 100 million rural, 280 million urban.

2. Upcoming 3G will primarily help voice as the spectrum is clogged. Data will be secondary.

3. Ajit Balakrishnan of rediff thinks

• India has 40 million unique Internet users over a month. In 10 years - he expects the number to be 300 million.
• India has 300+ million mobile phone users; estimates of how many of these access the internet in any given 30 day period vary but 10m looks right
• Lack of credit cards has caused ecommerce to be nascent in India. He thinks debit cards may be a solution.
• India needs angels and VC's. Can't rely on US investors.
• For VAS, Indian operators tend to keep over 80%. Says it should be near 50%. In China, they keep only 25%
• Print has a reach of 200M. TV has a reach of 200M. So Internet is ~20% of those two but gets only 3% of total ad revenues. Three reasons - poor broadband penetration, lack of localization, poor credit card penetration (India has 10M credit card users only because India lacks a credit rating system).
• Interesting analogy - With 3G, India may leapfrog PC's and go straight to mobiles as India bypassed mainframes.

4. Leading cell phone brands in India, Apr 2009. GSM-CDMA = 70:30

Brands	Installed base*
	GSM	CDMA	Total (GSM + CDMA)
LG	4.4%	47.6%	14.4%
Motorola	7.8%	5.4%	7.2%
Nokia	62.6%	24.3%	53.7%
Samsung	9.0%	11.2%	9.5%
Sony-Ericsson	8.9%		6.8%

5. SMS in India - http://www.slideshare.net/cellzapp/mobile-market-report-sms-usage-in-urban-india

• Men use SMS for sports, stocks; Women use it for astrology and spirituality
• 20% of mobile users use SMS
• 30 % SMS services used in 6 largest metros
• 25% participated in some content through SMS
• Topics of interest on SMS - jokes, astrology, news and jobs
• 10% mobile users use SMS for social networking

In progress...