wordpress blog stats
Connect with us

Hi, what are you looking for?

On Nokia’s Big Direct To Consumer Gamble With Ovi; JV With HCL

prepaid recharge

Extending its relationship with HCL Infosystems, Nokia has announced plans to set up a joint venture with the Indian company "to sell mobile value added services and entertainment content directly to consumers in India." This appears to be the offline model for Nokia's services and content business - Ovi. HCL has been working with Nokia for over 10 years now, managing their distribution network and "Nokia Care Centers", their customer care initiative. It appears that we might just see a retail infrastructure established for USB drives loaded with legal music, wallpapers and games. The Big Direct To Consumer Gamble Our sense is that this will be the largest direct-to-consumer VAS initiative in India yet. For many years now, VAS companies have flirted with the idea of developing an offline strategy and bypassing the mobile operator, but viability has been a key issue. Mobile content kiosks are nice to talk about at conferences and present as case studies to the press (including us), but managing a huge distribution network on low content margins, and managing the billing from multiple points-of-purchase, has been a major challenge. Such a business does not work without massive scale - the kind that mobile operators have achieved with their pre-paid recharge business. A few things to keep in mind when considering the retail play, based on inputs from a research MediaNama had done last year: 1. Low VAS ARPU and Limited Base: A majority of the mobile user base in India is pre-paid, and a large…

Please subscribe/login to read the full story.
Written By

Founder @ MediaNama. TED Fellow. Asia21 Fellow @ Asia Society. Co-founder SaveTheInternet.in and Internet Freedom Foundation. Advisory board @ CyberBRICS

Free Reads

News

Telecom companies are against a regulatory sandbox, as they think information revealed by businesses during the sandboxing process might be confidential should be out...

News

According to a statement, the executive body of the European Union had also sought internal documents on the risk assessments and mitigation measures for...

News

The newly launched partially open-sourced LLM Grok-1 can be commercially used but not trademarked.

MediaNama’s mission is to help build a digital ecosystem which is open, fair, global and competitive.

Views

News

NPCI CEO Dilip Asbe recently said that what is not written in regulations is a no-go for fintech entities. But following this advice could...

News

Notably, Indus Appstore will allow app developers to use third-party billing systems for in-app billing without having to pay any commission to Indus, a...

News

The existing commission-based model, which companies like Uber and Ola have used for a long time and still stick to, has received criticism from...

News

Factors like Indus not charging developers any commission for in-app payments and antitrust orders issued by India's competition regulator against Google could contribute to...

News

Is open-sourcing of AI, and the use cases that come with it, a good starting point to discuss the responsibility and liability of AI?...

You May Also Like

News

Google has released a Google Travel Trends Report which states that branded budget hotel search queries grew 179% year over year (YOY) in India, in...

Advert

135 job openings in over 60 companies are listed at our free Digital and Mobile Job Board: If you’re looking for a job, or...

News

By Aroon Deep and Aditya Chunduru You’re reading it here first: Twitter has complied with government requests to censor 52 tweets that mostly criticised...

News

Rajesh Kumar* doesn’t have many enemies in life. But, Uber, for which he drives a cab everyday, is starting to look like one, he...

MediaNama is the premier source of information and analysis on Technology Policy in India. More about MediaNama, and contact information, here.

© 2008-2021 Mixed Bag Media Pvt. Ltd. Developed By PixelVJ

Subscribe to our daily newsletter
Name:*
Your email address:*
*
Please enter all required fields Click to hide
Correct invalid entries Click to hide

© 2008-2021 Mixed Bag Media Pvt. Ltd. Developed By PixelVJ