Cellebrum pins hopes on rural India for growth

Cellebrum, a Spice Telecom group company and one of the leading value-added-services (VAS) providers, plans to introduce tailor-made services for rural India and for enterprises. The company is also eyeing international markets for more VAS offerings.

According to Mohit Rampal, chief sales officer of Cellebrum, "Currently music-on-demand is the highest revenue driver for us. Going forward, we intend to introduce tailor-made products for rural India on healthcare, education and agriculture. The future of VAS is in rural pockets and these areas are of use to them."

"Applications such as information on commodity prices, crop and weather data and other local concerns find acceptance in the semi-urban and rural areas, reason why we will focus on these areas while introducing more VAS," said Rampal.

"Another area of interest for rural and semi-urban areas is VAS developed on religious and devotional topics, like ‘hanuman chalisa,’ etc. Education is another important area. For instance, we introduced a service to help people learn English. We got 10,000 users in India subscribing to the service within 10 days," Rampal informed.

Cellebrum already offers information on mandi rates, weather reports, career counselling and hospital databases.

"Our portal on mandi rates is a voice-based application in which the farmer gets to know the latest rates of over 7,000 commodities. It is already used by service providers such as Idea Cellular in the different rural belts of the country," said Rampal.

Operators expect demand to rise in the rural parts which are relatively less affected by the economic downturn. "We expect rural subscribers to account for 40 per cent of the total subscriber base by 2012 compared to 25 per cent now," Credit Suisse said in an industry report.

At present, the country’s mobile subscriber base stands at over 375 million. Of this, a quarter comes from the rural areas. State-owned Bharat Sanchar Nigam has the maximum reach in rural India followed by Bharti Airtel, Vodafone Essar and Aircel.

Cellebrum is also looking at more SMS-based VAS for enterprise businesses.

"We are also looking at creating VAS for employment opportunities. Simultaneously, we are looking at international markets like the SAARC countries, where VAS models are different. For instance, voice-mail is a big market abroad, while in India it is primarily music and SMS," Rampal added.