RCom: 3000 Android activations daily and focus on data
Reliance Communications, India's second largest mobile service provider, announced their Q12013 results which have revealed a lot of itneresting numbers and plans about how the company hopes to continue growing and reduce their debt. The company has been going through some financial challenges on paper which led them to consider potential sale of assets like cell towers. Unable to achiever something significant, the company considered alternatives and raised as much as $5 Billion from Chinese banks.
Some highlights from the Q12013 report:
- Rs 1,500 Crore (~$270M) investment to improve network and data services
- Rs 369 Crore (~$66.5M) from that already invested
- RCom's pipes handle almost 12% of world's data traffic
- RCom has 4 Million 3G subscribers (active) and 24 Million data users
RCom's 5 year plan is quite simple: continue exponential growth in Indian telecom's expected exponential growth. According to RCom's executives, in 4 to 5 years:
- India's telecom market to grow from Rs 1,35,000 Crore (~$24.3B) to Rs 1,85,000 Crore (~$33.3B)
- India's data services market to grow from Rs 7,000 Crore (~$1.2B) to Rs 35,000 Crore (~$6.3B)
- RCom wants to grow their revenues in data services from Rs 1,400 Crore (~$252M) to Rs 9,000 Crore (~$1.6B)
RCom entered the Indian telecom market as a formidibale CDMA player and the company wants to retain and gain more CDMA customers by bringing better phones to the market. In addition to this, RCom expects to offer as much as 42Mbps data connectivity.
Earlier this year, RCom and Google entered a strategic 2-year deal where RCom will be promoting Google services and Android based phones. As it turns out, in their Q12013 report, the company says the deal has helped them activate as many as 3,000 new phones daily compared to 800 before the deal. The company has been spending resources on developing an executive sales team to strengthen and leverage their 1.5 Lac (0.15M) retail outlets to sell phones, tablets & data dongles.
On a different topic, Reliance Digital TV owns 10% of India's DTH market with 4.4 Million users.
PS: It will be interesting to see how the sibling rivalry plays out in India's telecom market.
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