(From left) Hyunbai Kim, vice-president and head of CDMA division of Samsung Telecommunications India, Pankaj Sethi, president (value-added services) of Tata Teleservices and Rajamani Ganesh, senior director (business development) of Qualcomm India, in Calcutta on Thursday. Picture by Kishor Roy Chowdhury

Calcutta, Sept. 13: Value-added services that come with mobile connections contribute around 8-9 per cent to revenues, and CDMA operators feel this could go up to almost 15 per cent in the next two years.

CDMA operators such as Tata Indicom expect the demand for non-voice services such as messaging, caller tones and ring tones to increase.

However, GSM operators such as Bharti Airtel are not too optimistic. They have experienced a drop in non-voice revenues for the past 8-9 quarters to around 9.5 to 10 per cent now. These operators do not expect revenues to touch global levels of 13 to 14 per cent with the existing 2G or 2.5G technology. They feel introduction of 3G can only bring more revenues.

Pankaj Sethi, president (value-added services) of Tata Teleservices said: “We expect a 15 per cent contribution to revenues from value-added or non-voice services in the next two years. In Europe, these services contribute very little to revenues but in technology sensitive markets such as Japan and Korea, the earnings could be as high as 20 to 30 per cent. The 3G rollout and customers’ response to it will also determine the growth of non-voice services.”

However, text messaging, which brings in bulk of the revenue among value-added services, is not popular in villages as it poses a language barrier. Therefore, rural growth has not led to higher revenue from non-voice services. Moreover, these services are not priced too high.

“With 2G in place and the way services are priced in India, 15-16 per cent revenue will not come in a hurry,” said Sanjay Kapoor, president (mobile service), Bharti Airtel .

“With 3G rollout, we expect a surge in our corporate customers and the use of value-added services,” Sethi added.

Mobile Internet

Tata Indicom, Samsung and Qualcomm today launched a web browser for CDMA phones.

The service comes for a fee of Rs 99 per month on the Samsung Explore handset, which is priced at Rs 5,499.