We are creating a hub for international roaming on prepaid: Bharti Airtel

What are the key trends in the wholesale voice business?

On the wholesale side, there are basically two kinds of business-NLD and the ILD. ILD business is not necessarily carrying your our own traffic.Transit business is one business we are incubting. I call it so as no one is a leader here. Maximum market share a player in this space had is anywhere up to 5%. This is expanding very rapidly. We have almost doubled the business every year in the last two years. If all go well, we will continue at the same pace. It is a nice offshoot for us.

The voice business is under pricing pressures. How difficult is it then to maintain good margins?

This is why transit business is so important. It helps us pick up business from different parts of the world. Typically, all markets undergo some cycles due to various reasons-more players coming in, regulatory changes, more cable systems. What the transit business helps us to do is to carry traffic for countries where we have interconnects. At present we have interconnects in more than 100 countries, with over 400 global operators. Therefore, if there are more margins or more traffic in a particular country, we can carry it for them. It thus helps us to tap in to thatt traffic and those margins. I look at my transit business as a game of chess because if you make particular move this way because you think it is the right one and when the other player moves the other way you have the ability to play another gambit and opportunities are immense.

Industry is seeing a lot of VAS contribution to enterprise business. How big is the VAS market for enterprises?

It is difficult to answer this as each type of VAS creates a market of its own. For example, we have a home-grown platform called Mobile Application Tool for Enterprises (MATE) to look if we can use any application of our mobile service to solve the problem of the enterprises, but we can't say there is a market for that. So, here is a limitless possibility. This platform enables various applications to plug in to mobile platform. It could be for people in pharma company, media houses, sales force, or an ERP application. So, I can't really define a market for this but I am certain that we can build a business of Rs 100 crore perhaps in eighteen to twenty months, and I am sure we will. But mobile applications per say the kind of funds that are available for corporates in the entire set of the mobile handheld devices,applications, interfaces to my mind is a minimum of Rs 500 crore. It is a market that has to be developed.

Tell us about your expansion plans and new products.

We are getting into some new poducts for wholesale, for instance, a great product like international tollfree. It is required by both corporates and carriers. The carriers need an international tollfree as they are trying to sell that service to their customers in their location, so they need to connect to a carrier in India and what better carrier to connect with other than the one who has more than 40% of outcalling. Besides, the tollfree we are trying to do something on roaming. Currently, prepaid subscribers cannot roam internationally. We are trying to create a hub to enable people from various pre-paid platforms across to roam in to India. And those who join the hub, the Airtel subscribers can roam on their networks in countries that they operate in. The hub is operational for Airtel to Airtel. We are in business talks with multiple operators in the world and I am sure we will have sign-ups on prepaid hubs coming up.

Last year, we launched domestic tollfree for corporates. From zero last year we are about 120 lines, which is massive growth.

heenaj@cybermedia.co.in