Mobile Value Added Services Market in Pakistan and India

This post take a look at the Mobile Telecom Value Added Services (VAS) Market in Pakistan and India. These services add value to the standard voice service and usually drive up the revenue per user. SMS, ring tones, picture/video messaging such as greetings, games and accessing Internet or other data services (such as Telenor Edge) are common examples of value-added services for mobile phones.

All the mobile phone companies in Pakistan offer many value added services in forms of various forms of messaging, information, ring tones, music and every imaginable entertainment one can think of. There are too many of these services around to link them here but if you visit the mobile company websites you will find these services clearly advertised. Messaging and ring tones are the biggest revenue producers though I do not have numbers for the market size. I covered the messaging in an earlier post. Ring tones may evoke strong opinions from people for various (social and cultural?) reasons but if you look beyond that ring tones market has done surprisingly well all over the world. It is unclear whether 3G and Mobile web 2.0 will have a significant impact on South Asian market in the coming years.

Related to this is the recent surge of interest in Mobile Virtual Network Operators(MVNOs) which according to some media headlines means that now “Everybody Can Be a Cellphone Company”. In Pakistan PTA introduced the first MVNO framework a few days ago. As TM wrote: “MVNO will allow a formal way to these cellular operators to sell of their network capacities to newer marketing outfits that better understand their own customer niches and can probably provider some extra value added services to their crowds.”

PixSenseis one of the few Pakistan based startups which offers an innovative product which is closely related to global VAS providers. Green and White has covered it here.

In India there are a number of upcoming startups which are tapping into this market. An article in Business Standard reports: The over Rs 4,500-crore telecom value added services (VAS) market is hotting up and players are working overtime to offer India’s 170 million strong mobile subscribers a feast of innovative services — all with an eye on increasing their market share and bottom line.

Some of the upcoming value added services mentioned in the article:

`Ring To Me’ tones & user generated content

Video SMS using avatars

Voice SMS (used by Warid)

Ad-supported free group messaging service

Here’s more from the Business Standard article.