Bharat Exhibitions has recently conducted 14th VAS Asia 2013 Conference. At this conference, it was revealed that the wireless Value-Added Services would include all services that are delivered through different devices, are expected to create over 25,000 highly scalable new businesses with a revenue potential of Rs.10 lakh crore (Rs.10 trillion) over a period of time.
R. K. Arnold, Member, Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI), said, “To achieve this, all the stakeholders involved in the telecom industry will have to work together to create a low-cost smartphone device and make people aware of the potential of such a device.
Shashi Dharan, Managing Director, Bharat Exhibitions, said, “The issue today with TARI is not against the industry making money, but how does it make money is surely an issue.”
Currently, 40% of the Indian population has the connectivity and out of which about four per cent are having smartphones. Mobile data could generate revenues worth Rs.40,000 crore by 2015.
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Rajan S. Mathews, Director-General, Cellular Operators’ Association of India, welcomed the latest changes that the TRAI has made in the regulations in VAS service provision. He focussed on the need to rethink on revenue-sharing model between operators, application providers and government.
Mathews said that the operators should be allowed to use it in the way they consider best rather than government forcing it on them as it involved huge costs that would impact service charges. He also emphasized that there was a huge opportunity in penetration of vernacular languages in the mobile smartphones specifically in speech recognition at the bottom of the pyramid level.
