Changes are taking place at Spice Mobility, as it reorganizes its services business into a company of companies, as a precursor to the listing of Spice Digital on Indian bourses. Samir Gulve, Joint Managing Director, Spice Mobility, explained to MediaNama the restructuring of the companies as follows: After the sale of Spice Communications to Idea Cellular, the Spice Group had two public listed mobile entities - Spice Mobile, which is listed in India, and MediaRing (now called Spice i2i), a Singapore listed company that they acquired in 2009. In India, Spice reverse merged all their mobility pieces, and rechristened Spice Mobiles as Spice Mobility. Spice Mobility now includes the devices based business (Spice Mobiles), device retail (Hotspot, now called Spice Retail) and Mobile Value Added Services - Spice Digital (previously Cellebrum) and Spice Labs. International devices and retail businesses - for example, CSL in Malaysia - were put under Spice i2i. "To make mobility really happen", Gulve says, "you need devices, services and experience touch points for the consumers - to explain them and guide them. For the bottom of the pyramid segment, don't to look at retail as classic retail, but more as a physical portal to mobility. You can even distribute value added services through that - create bluetooth zones, and try and buy experiences. At the top of the pyramid, the discovery and consumption can happen virtually, but as you go down to the masses, physical presence becomes important." The group is taking a separate approach to retail,…
