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Our Bureau

New Delhi, Aug 31 Bharti Airtel is working on bringing health related services on mobile phones as part of its strategy to offer differentiation to its consumers.

Mr Raghunath Mandava, Chief Marketing Officer, Bharti Airtel, told Business Line: “While I cannot divulge what exactly we are planning, our team is working is working on bringing some interesting and useful health services on mobile. For example, in some of the African countries, operators are offering location-based services, which tell subscribers the nearest health centre.”

Airtel has also been aggressive on offering financial services on mobile. Its partnership with mCheck which allows subscribers to pay for their bills and tickets has been taken up by more than a million users so far.

Mr Mandava said that the company is also focussing on the rural areas since 50 per cent of the new user base is coming from villages. “We have set up a separate team which only develops strategies on how best we can reach to the rural users. One of the issues we have seen that villagers face while buying a mobile connection is that they need help in choosing the right plan and also the right handset models. It’s a huge decision for them.

“To address this concern, we have set up Airtel local service centres in rural areas wherein all their queries and issues are dealt with by trained people,” he said.

Health and finance related services are among the top value added services that is expected to take off going forward. For example, some international operators have introduced handsets with embedded chips that work like a credit card. The only difference is that instead of swiping a card all one has to do is to place the phone on a reader device that credits the transaction against ones credit card account.

But one issue facing Indian value added service market is the lopsided revenue share arrangement in favour of the operators. Indian operators tend to keep as much as 70 per cent of the revenue earned from a VAS application while the company develops the service gets only 30 per cent. In countries such as Japan, VAS players get as much 80 per cent.

According to Mr Mandava, the revenue share will change sooner than later since operators realise that it is only to their advantage that there is a good ecosystem for application development.

More Stories on : Telecommunications | Health | Bharti Tele-Ventures Ltd

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