Continuing with the flavor of the season, the mobile phones, let me do a retro of the growth of the Indian mobile market as I've analyzed and understood....
My first intro into a mobile world was some 5 years back when I bought an off-the-shelf Nokia 3310 for a then hefty sum of Rs. 8k. BPL Mobile used to rule the roost in Coimbatore and other parts of India and there were very few takers for prepaid cards. Remember, this was the time when even incoming calls were insanely charged. A mobile phone was a luxury at that time, with people flaunting it [including me :-)] as a fashion statement. Then the first revolution happened when incoming calls were made free.
The second revolution happened when somebody had the brains of marketing prepaid cards effectively!! Instead of monthly rentals plus call charges, one could go buy a small prepaid card, thus helping him/her to control her budget also!! Whosever idea that was, brilliant!!
Then the tectonic shift happened when the Big Brothers decided to enter... yep, the Reliance group. They not only made mobile phones cheaper, but also tried to kill the competition... you know, the sorts of "one stone and two birds" Anyone could get a Reliance mobile set for Rs. 500 and had just needed to pay in easy instalments... Millions and millions of cheques were given and Reliance mobile started selling like hot cakes... It's a different story that most of the consumers cheated them with bouncing cheques and everyone thought that Reliance was doomed!! Or so they thought I would say... Reliance had a "brilliant" marketing ploy at their hands... they wanted the great indian middle class to have a first hand account of a mobile hand and they pretty well knew that once people start using it, they can't live without it. So, though Reliance had millions of rupees going under the drainage, what many people didn't notice was that they got as many customers as they can get which other operators couldn't!! Then, as depicted brilliantly in the movie Guru, Reliance played the master-stroke and bend the rules and made CDMA as equivalent as GSM in India...
I also want to take a pointer that Indian's are probably the only cult in the world who has effectively used the "Missed Call" phenomenon to communicate! :-)
The rest, my dear countrymen, is history!! India is the cheapest mobile telephony market in the world and also the fastest growing... No wonder the world is bringing all its dollars to get a pie of this hot cake!!
There lies a bright future for mobilephones in India and across the world if handset mfrs. and oprtrs. play their cards right with the help of the Indian Government!
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