Flytxt eyes 3 more deals from telecom market

With the Reliance Communications deal already in its kitty covering the former’s 65 million subscribers, Flytxt, the Netherlands-based technology provider for mobile marketing, is now focusing on capturing more business from the Indian market. The company has a global development centre at Technopark in Thiruvananthapuram.

The closely-held Dutch firm is currently in talks with all the major mobile carriers in India to offer its flagship product – Neon – a fully-integrated mobile marketing platform that helps large operators and other service providers conduct large-scale mobile consumer engagement programmes.

“India is quick to join the mobile bandwagon. The subscriber base for wireless services increased to 209.07 million in 2007 to cross 350 million now, a clear indication of proliferation of mobile value-added services (VAS). With increased VAS, mobile marketing is one such interesting option being aggressively explored. We are in talks with a few operators in India and expect to bag at least three of them during this calendar year,” Tim Williams, co-founder and executive vice-president (worldwide sales) of Flytxt, told Business Standard.

According to New York-based ABI Research, the market for mobile marketing and advertising is expected to touch $24 billion by 2013 globally, while conservative estimates put the Indian market at Rs 500 core by 2012, from the present Rs 40 crore.

Williams said though mobile operators, as the owners of customer data, understand the opportunity, they are limited by disjointed and poorly-integrated technology tools. “In India, operators are wrestling with the not-so-sophisticated technologies and manual methods to reach out to their targeted subscribers and measure results – a void which we intend to fill with Neon,” he said.

Flytxt currently has 60 professional at its Thiruvananthapuram centre, who are engaged in software development, quality assurance, and systems operations and management. “We will be scaling up our Indian workforce to 150 by this year end as we add more operators to our list of clients,” Williams said, adding the company expects to grow over 300 per cent this year, with a majority of the revenues flowing in from its operators business in India.