Corporates a boon to telcos

The booming IT sector in Bangalore has come as a boon to cellular operators in the city. Not only are they garnering an increasing number new subscribers, they are also being targeted by corporates across the city.

These are drawn to any telecom service provider who is proactive to their changing needs and also provides value addition at competitive rates.

In return for the corporate business, cellular operators are providing some exclusive features to the employees of their organisations, to an extent that cell phones have virtually become mobile intercoms. Depending on the size of the organisation, a corporate may have multiple vendors.

"Corportate customer usage is a major turnaround story. We are very optimistic about corporate accounts in Bangalore. The average revenue per user (ARPU) for a corporate customer is nearly 3 to 4 times higher than an average ordinary customer. For many companies, we even provide the Closed User Group facility, where an employee can track his colleague in a different location by SMSing the letters of his name and in turn, receiving the mobile number. AirTel handles nearly 2,000 corporate accounts in Bangalore alone and this contributes about 40 per cent of our revenues in Karnataka," Rohit Malhotra, vice president-sales and marketing, Bharti Mobile Ltd, said.

Corporate accounts are beneficial both to the service provider as well as the end user (employees). A single account means thousands of customers to the service provider. To an employee, not only does his company effectively foot a good part of his bill, it also provides him with features like office intercoms.

Cellular operators in the city anticipate that some corporate accounts in Bangalore are witnessing such robust growth that this rate may turn out to be even better than in circles like Mumbai and Delhi.

In fact, AirTel has gone to the extent of providing a unique facility for BPO companies, where it has designed a productivity tool to validate the movement of vehicles for BPO companies. These vehicles are mostly used by BPO companies to pick up and drop their employees.

"This is called route optimisation planning. With this, we manage to track the movement of the vehicle and the amount of time it requires to cover a certain distance. With add ons like this, we are looking at maximising our penetration to nearly 60-65 BPO companies," added Malhotra.

Adds Samuel Selvakumar, chief executive officer, Hutchison Essar-South: "In Karnataka, we entered the market as the fourth cellular operator just over 24 months ago. In this short time, we have acquired a significant share of new acquisitions.