Date: 9th to 13th Feb 2009 Segments: Editorial, Editors Picks, Discussion, Poll Results, Articles, Industry News, Events, Jobs Editorial February has been a mixed month for the Mobile Value Added Services business - firstly, there was a show of faith in new technology as Canaan Partners backed upstart MCarbon; we particularly liked the fact that they're innovating on SMS by introducing session based SMS menus. Bigger, sobering news was to follow last week with a relatively unknown entity called Altruist acquiring Mobile2Win. One industry exec commented on Facebook that the deal is disappointing as an all stock deal, with no cash component. I found this deal disappointing for one particular reason - the communication that the combined entity clocks Rs. 200 crores in revenue; that would make it the second largest Mobile VAS player, and Altruist would be a significant player even at Rs. 165 crores. Following a comment by one of our readers, we confirmed the truth from Dheeraj Agarwal, founder of Altruist: the Rs. 200 crores figure was inclusive of operator revenue share. Which means that if you assume even 25% revenue share, the combined entity clocks Rs. 50 crores in revenue, and Altruist clocks around Rs. 41.25 crores in revenue. Agarwal also told us that Mobile2Win was significantly in the red, and Altruist had taken on its debt. VCCircle further reported that the investors got only 10% in Altruist, and retained 10% in Mobile2Win. There have been rumours that investors owned around 50% of Mobile2Win, if not more. You can do…
