India’s Tata Teleservices Ltd. (TTL) Wednesday unveiled an integrated technology-agnostic structure to leverage emerging market opportunities.
The company has declared that it would leverage its wide range of products and services and reach out to customers with one common brand – Tata DoCoMo – cutting across the CDMA and GSM platforms.
“All the Tata Indicom customers shall be migrated to Tata DoCoMo from tomorrow,” TTL said in a released statement.
“These are exciting times at TTL and mark the company’s evolution from being just an access provider to a multi-platform telecom applications and solutions organization, with one single brand — Tata DoCoMo — for customer connect, ease and delight. This is the birth of Telecom 2.0,” said Deepak Gulati, TTL’s executive president for its mobility business.
“Our new strategy will unify our brands and unlock the synergies across the CDMA, GSM & 3G platforms. We are pleased to welcome our Tata Indicom customers into the Tata DoCoMo family, offering them a new world of telecom and lifestyle-impacting experiences,” he added.
The company also unveiled Photon Max on Tata DoCoMo, the latest addition to its Photon family of high-speed mobile broadband access products on the CDMA platform. The new product, which is compatible with the CDMA2000 1x EV-DO Revision B standard, will be available in five metropolitan cites – Mumbai, Kolkata, Delhi, Hyderabad and Chennai – with another 22 cities across the country set to be mapped by the end of the year.
Photon Max will be available to consumers under two schemes. In one, the product is being launched at an introductory price of $41, with around $15 to be paid as monthly rentals, with 1.5 gigabytes of free data usage. In a second bundled offer, the customer will pay $81 upfront and get the device and 1 GB of data usage per month free for five months.
The company said it wants to bring in TTL’s full might of telecom experience to customers through an elevation in the promise from “only telecom” to seamless “access,” relevant “content” and differentiated “solution.”
“Our new business approach gives TTL new strategic direction in the access, content and solutions spaces, enabling the company to offer compelling propositions to customers in a market that has been witnessing far-reaching changes in terms of usage trends and customer preferences. The growth of the Internet usage on phones, the arrival of smartphones, the explosion of social-networking and the evolution of the Indian consumer — all have led to a fundamental shift in the role of the mobile phone in everyone’s life. We believe the phone is no longer just for talking; it holds the potential to impact lifestyles, even transform lives,” Gulati said.
TTL is planning significant investments to upgrade its CDMA network to deepen and widen the existing footprint.
The company has also put in place a new integrated go-to-market approach across the sales, marketing and customer service domains. For instance:
- The Company’s 3,000-plus-strong CDMA retail footprint will now become accessible for GSM as well, and vice versa;
- Tata Photon’s strong post-pay channel will become an asset for GSM;
- GSM’s strong digital marketing footprint will become a channel for Tata Photon.
The migration of services to the unified Tata DoCoMo brand will happen in Delhi-NCR at a later date. This will not impact TTL’s Indicom, Photon and Walky consumers in Delhi as they will continue to get the same quality of service as in the past.
NTT DoCoMo on its Indian investment
Interestingly, according to a Wall Street Journal report, a senior executive from TTL’s overseas partner, NTT DoCoMo, said the Japanese company didn’t expect its investments in India to become profitable for “several years” despite rapid growth in the subcontinent’s highly competitive telecommunications market.
The tough environment in India, where the industry regulatory framework remains in flux after recent corruption scandals, also means “there’s no way all 15 (mobile) carriers can survive in the end,” the Japanese company’s senior EVP Masatoshi Suzuki said in a recent interview with Dow Jones Wires.
“India’s ‘murky and unclear’ telecom policies make it unlikely for Tata Teleservices – among the top six mobile operators by subscribers in India – to make a sudden turnaround, while other Indian carriers have taken four to five years to break even,” Suzuki added.
NTT DoCoMo has a 26.5% stake in Tata Teleservices.
