Airtel peps up services with a VAS monthly

NEW DELHI: Bharti Airtel is betting big on value-added services (VAS) to achieve its target of becoming the most admired brand in the country by 2010. It has now decided to launch one new VAS application every month for the next two years.

“Currently, data applications account for 10.6% of our total revenue. In the next two years, VAS will be a crucial focus area,” Manoj Kohli, president, Bharti Airtel, told ET. Mr Kohli said it would be difficult to predict Bharti’s revenue from VAS in the next 24 months, but cited emerging markets such as Indonesia, China and Philippines as examples where value-added services accounted for 20-25% of the operators’ annual earnings.

“Our target areas would be entertainment, media, portals, internet applications, Bollywood, music, sports and gaming. We will soon announce partnerships for a whole range of services which would help build our brand image,” he said. According to Mr Kohli, Bharti’s partnership with Google to facilitate Google search on Airtel mobiles is also part of this strategy.

This is Bharti’s fifth new VAS application in the past five months. Other recent launches include ‘SongCatcher’ (where customers can record, request and download the music of choice) ‘Mobile Ticketing’ in a partnership with PVR, Microsoft Windows Mobile 5.0 (where users can access MS office — Outlook, Word, excel, PPT and Internet Explorer and multi-media functions) and ‘Hinterwars’, a next generation connected gaming platform. Asked if Bharti was planning to hive-off its towers into a separate company, Mr Kohli said, “As of now, we have no plans.” He declined to comment on whether Bharti would divest it in future.

On improving the quality of services, Mr Kohli said that Bharti, which has outsourced its network maintenance to both Nokia and Ericsson, was flying in European-based engineers from these two companies to carry out its network optimisation tasks.