More than 15.6 million Idea connections accessed Facebook from their mobile phone in the last quarter, over 8 million accessed YouTube and 4.3 million accessed WhatsApp, the company's MD Himanshu Kampania said on its earnings conference call for the quarter ended September 30th 2013. Kapania said that India is at the tip of the iceberg as far as data growth is concerned: in the past year 14.7 million Idea customers have started using mobile data, traffic for which has has also increased by 99.6% from Q2FY13, with 17.5 billion MB data transfer during the quarter. Mobile data revenue as a percentage of service revenue has increased by 3.3% to 8.7%. Kapania said that there is a huge scope to increase mobile data revenue contribution when benchmarked with similar sized economies in South East Asia where mobile data revenue as a percentage of service revenue is in the range of 18-25%. In addition to his previous warning about Internet based messaging services like Whatsapp impacting non-data VAS for Idea, Kapania said that while only around 36% of Idea's connection base uses SMS, many high-usage SMS customers have shifted to Internet based messaging services. While the impact on revenues has not been significant, given that SMS only accounts for around 2.5-3.5% of Idea's overall revenues, he did say that the company wanted to appraise investors of a potential threat in the future. "Services such as YouTube and Whatsapp are able to reach so many users only because of the capital-intensive network they…
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