e-Commerce: Gaining Traction in India

e-Commerce was a non starter in India in the early days. That was before IRCTC stepped in with its online booking. I remember the long painful queues in front of the railway booking counters before the online booking system of IRCTC stepped in. A railway ticket in those days could be booked only by an agent or else, the whole activity of booking a train ticket used to be a half day ordeal in itself. All that changed with the advent of IRCTC train ticket reservation. How easy it was booking a ticket by simply clickinginto the website and doing the needful. The long sweaty queues were now relegated to history.

Led by train and flight reservations online ticketing has been the most successful force in online E-commerce industry. This also supplemented by the fact that today online travel industry constitutes 78% of the total E-commerce industry in India.

IRCTC contributes to 1/3rd of the total e-Commerce revenues in India. The e-Commerce revenues are slated at Rs. 9000 crores and IRCTC contributes Rs.3400 crores in that. 45 million tickets were sold in FY 2008 and it has seen a jump of 100% YOY. However the potential for IRCTC is still higher and it can yet add more revenues to itself. A few steps to increase the online ticketing activity:

1. Reduce additional charges for i-tickets and e-tickets to increase penetration and induce more people into a internet based ticket purchase. This helps since the service is mostly used by agents who charge additional commission apart from charges levied by IRCTC from their customers this again limits the penetration level and if the users are given more payment avenues it could propel many to go for direct transactions.

2. Allow booking of rail cargos and other railway services on a large scale then it can definitely garner more traction in terms of higher transaction size and remove bottlenecks at the same time attracting SME to the fold.

3.Association with commercial banks may help in getting more traction especially if rail cargos and other services are introduced through IRCTC.

The growth today is good, but it could get much better if these simple steps are also taken up. For Railways, it would reduce process costs of maintaining a bulky ticketing department.

The other large player which can simply multiply its value add by online transactions is India Post. It currently delivers 1,575 crore mails every year linking every nook and corner of the country through a network of 1,54,149 post offices and 5,64,701 letter boxes. The government owned services like India post if implements E-commerce in a serious way then India could definitely remove the barriers of E-commerce industry.

Terminator to take over Twitter

Sony pictures has launched a game release on Twitter for its soon to be released movie, Terminator Salvation. The game would allow Twitter users to join the human resistance against the machines in Sony Pictures Releasing its first-ever game created for the social networking platform.

This initiative is unique in many ways, since it Is Sony Pictures first attempt at advertising their product by using Social Networking tools which directly speak to their TGs. Sony Pictures International executive vice president marketing Sal Ladestro said, “We think this is the perfect environment for the Terminator game as it allows users to interact with the movie, their friends and other game players instantaneously.” A viral marketing campaign of this scale is one to be watched from the perspective of user involvement, engagement translating into a creating awareness and achieving a vital objective (making the Terminator Franchise successful).Needless to say, if the game catches the fancy of the public it would be a great promotional move for the movie and may ignite similiar actions in future.

Sony denied any monetary compensation to Twitter but Twitter can certainly leverage its property as a new means for advertisers and marketers to promote their products in the future, rather than the passive and traditional method of displaying banner ads.

Will low user retention cap Twitter's growth?

This is my century posting on this blog. It has been 9 months since i started this blog and i appreciate your patronage to my ideas, thoughts and feelings.

A study conducted by Nielsen reveals that 60% of Twitter users fail to return to the micro blogging site a month later. In other words the user retention rates of Twitter languish at 40%! Whats more worrying from Twitter's perepective is Nielsen's forecast that at 40% retention, Twitter wont grow its internet reach at more than 10% per annum. The retention- reach model that has been used is based upon regression analysis and the following is its pictorial depiction.

Although a high retention rate doesn’t guarantee a massive audience, but it is a prerequisite. There simply won’t be enough new users to make up for defecting ones after a certain point.

There are two arguements in favour of Twitter are:

1. The majority of Twitter use happens away from the site, on mobile phones and apps like Tweetdeck, and it’s theoretically possible to be an avid Twitterer but never visit Twitter.com after you sign up

2. A lot about Twitter is a huge amount of Media mouthing as well from Obama to Ashton Kutcher to Oprah Winfrey, Lance Armstrong and more.. In essence there is lot of hype and expectation bubble around Twiter, which otherwise left to itself is doing pretty decent.

However young, it may be, Twitter's illustrious record pits it against the behemoths: Facebook and My Space in terms of Internet traffic. But the, compared tpo the boom period of Facebook and My Space, Twitter still fails to score points on Reach and Retention.

The study clearly states that retention levels at social network behemoths was double of Twitter even in their early boom phase and that retention only went up, and both sit at nearly 70 percent today.

The chart below shows the retention rate comparison with early years of Facebook and Myspace.

The answer to this may lie in the perception and usage of Twitter and its user profile. Poor retention, in other words -- just like the characteristics Nielsen attributes to Twitter traffic.The consumer value of a social-status service like Twitter resembles the value of "news" as a service. It is incidentally important, but not always important, and never all important to any one person. The intervals between incidents that you or I might deem important defy any prediction. Hence, a Obama election may form a Twitter peak, but a economic overhaul simply may not. Is this a question on supply as well? (May be another Obama-esque Twitter centric campaign or a Hudson landing will create the refresh for Twitter. Will it? We will watch this space.

Will Apple slip back now?

reproduced from http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2009/may/03/apple-iphone-technology-market

"Every once in a while a revolutionary product comes along that changes everything. Today Apple is going to reinvent the phone."... That was Steve Jobs at the launch of iPhone in 2007.

The ever-expanding array of touchscreen handsets is just the physical evidence of the monumental change the iPhone has wrought. It has sent some of the largest technology companies in the world back to the drawing board and proved that, given the opportunity, people will do far more with a phone than make calls and send texts. For Apple, the iPhone may also be one of the most important products it has produced since its first personal computers in the late 1970s.

Before the iPhone there were already touchscreen devices; there were mobile phones that could play music and videos; there were mobile phones that could access the internet and send emails; and it was already possible to download applications on to some devices in order to personalise them. But hardly anyone took advantage of these features. Finding them was hard enough; getting them to work was a nightmare and most consumers gave up.

"It is not as though Apple invented a totally new technology," says Adam Leach, principal analyst at consultancy Ovum. "What they did was re-think the whole mobile experience and produce a very polished experience compared with what people were used to."

The iPhone was also aimed at a segment of the market that the giants of the handset industry had been ignoring - the "high end". Nokia, Motorola and Sony Ericsson were chasing the middle of the market where the high volumes and high subsidies from the mobile phone operators were. Their launch strategies involved upgrading their phones bit by bit - a better camera, a brighter screen or larger memory - so as to make the "new" device just a little more attractive. Making a phone a different colour boosted sales, but did nothing to persuade anyone to do more than make calls, send texts or download the occasional ringtone.

The iPhone, in stark contrast, is sexy and very, very easy to use. Since its arrival there has been a stampede back into making top-tier phones, not least because the recession has decimated the mid-market. Cash-strapped consumers are demanding a much better phone in return for signing an expensive monthly contract; if they don't get one, they are opting for cheaper Sim-only deals and holding on to their old handset.

BlackBerry rushed out its first touchscreen device - the BlackBerry Storm - to be followed by the first from Nokia, the 5800; Samsung and LG have been churning out touchscreen devices from the Tocco and the Omnia to the Renoir and the Arena. Waiting in the wings are new touchscreen devices from Palm (the Pre) and Sony Ericsson (the Idou).

The iPhone's ease of use, meanwhile, has turned the spotlight back on an often neglected aspect of mobile phones: the software. A month after the iPhone appeared in the UK, Google brought together some of the biggest names in mobile to develop a new operating system. Called Android, it has already appeared on two touchscreen devices, made by HTC, and many more are planned. A year after the iPhone appeared, Nokia bought out its partners in Symbian, which produces operating systems for smartphones. Then Microsoft rewrote Windows Mobile and its new guise - unimaginatively called Windows Mobile 6.5 - has borrowed a lot from the iPhone's look and feel.

Already more than 1bn iPhone applications have been downloaded from the iTunes store. The Android marketplace is operating, while RIM - maker of the BlackBerry - is also pushing applications at its users. Nokia's Ovi Market and Microsoft's Windows Marketplace are both set to go live this month.

In the 12 months before the handset launched, Apple raked in $22bn in revenues. That has rocketed to almost $34bn in the past year, largely boosted by the iPhone and iPod Touch. The success of the iPod made Apple's Cupertino headquarters one of the coolest places to work in Silicon Valley and the iPhone has made it one of the most powerful.

With so much now at stake, some experts suggest the iPhone will soon become the most important technology Apple's empire has produced, even, potentially, eclipsing the computer business that revolutionised our lives in the 1980s. There are an estimated 1bn personal computers in use worldwide, but that many mobile phones are sold every year and for many people their first experience of computing will be through a mobile phone.

But while Apple caused a revolution, it is unlikely to become dominant in the market. It has sold just over 20m iPhones since the first device appeared in 2007; in that time more than 1.5bn phones have been shipped by everyone else. Later this month, the first wave of British users are freed from the contracts they had to sign to grab one of the early iPhones and start contemplating a replacement, they will be faced with a range of remarkably similar devices.A similar thing happened with the personal computer market. The concept was championed by Apple when it launched Apple II, the world's first personal computer, in 1977, and the first Macintosh in 1984, but other players now lead the market.

While iPhone is the Touch Pioneer, it faces tough competition from other wannabe's in the market today. So far, the other part of the twin strategy, applications has been successful in creating a stickiness around this product. However, competitors are working hard at that as well. It will be interesting to see, whether Apple slides down despite retain its Technology leadership crown or do the folks at Apple have another ground breaking innovation around the corner.

The rise of the Blackberry

A recent study conducted by Strategy Analytics on Smartphone market shares in the enterprise segment of the US markets has brought forward some interesting results. Contrary to expectations, the Apple I Phone, Symbian foundation and Google Android are not the hot properties as far as Enterprise segment Smartphones are concerned.The smartphone crown in the enterprise space belongs to Blackberry with 36% market share of the enterprise segment. Blackberry is followed by Windows with 27% of the smartphone market. Not only that, the Blackberry dominates the best selling smartphones (NPD group's latest smartphone ranking) in US (list below), RIM’s consumer smartphone market share increased 15 percent to nearly 50 percent of the smartphone market in Q1 2009 versus the prior quarter, as Apple’s and Palm’s share both declined 10 percent each.

1.RIM BlackBerry Curve (all 83XX models)
2.Apple iPhone 3G (all models)
3.RIM BlackBerry Storm
4.RIM BlackBerry Pearl (all models, except flip)
5.T-Mobile G1

Smartphones, which represented just 17 percent of US handset sales volume in Q1 2008, now make up 23 percent of sales. Even in this challenging economy, consumers are migrating toward Web-capable handsets and their supporting data plans to access more information and entertainment on the go. Backberry catapulted itself to the top in smartphones basis a wider range of its carrier network (4 for Blackberry versus 1 for Apple iPhone) and a smart give away promotion.

Blackberry has been able to capitulate on its no nonsense office assistant position very aggressively and with some support from President Obama's penchant for his devices, Blackberry has seen some phenomenal growth in 2008 - 2009. It evens finds itself listed in top 20 (ranked 16th) and only next to Nokia (in handsets) in Millward Brown's Brandz 100 most valuable brands. No mean task this for Blackberry!

Ref Reports:
http://www.npd.com/press/releases/press_090504.html
http://www.moconews.net/entry/419-research-in-motion-says-second-blackberry-storm-on-horizon/

A $100 billion brand

One of my favourite one liners about internet, technology and Google is "There is Internet and there is Google!". One of the most reverred tech companies Google became the first $100 billion brand in terms of Brand value (Millard Brown Brandz Top 100 most valuable 2009). A $100 billion tag is greater than most and many African, South American and Asian countries. Google finds itself to be a case study under Naseem Nicholas Taleb in his book Black Swan. Many analysts and thinkers are wary of the influence that Google holds over the internet often questioning "how much is our digital life is personal anyway (in the shadows of Omnipotent and Omnipresent Google)?"

In an year, where the overall value of the the top 100 brands had grown by 2% Google grew 16%. It's worth is 25% more than the worth of its second competitor, Microsoft! Coke,McDonalds, IBM, Apple, China Mobile, General Electric, Vodafone and Marlboro complete the top 10 list. This is the third year in a year when Goolge has secured the Tops in Millard Brown's Brandz 100!

Technology companies make the bulk of the the top 10, with Google (no 1), Microsoft (no 2), IBM (no 4), Apple (no 6), China Mobile (no 7) and Vodafone (no 9)! Handset manufacturer Nokia slips out of the top 10 with Vodafone replacing it as the most valauble European brand. Blackberry has seen a fantastic 100% jump in its brand value over the year.

It has been a good year for fast-food, cigarette and alcohol brands, as consumers suffering from so-called "recession depression" appear to have sought quick pick-me-ups.
McDonald's recorded a 34 per cent increase in brand value, year on year, followed by Marlboro (33%), Budweiser (23%) and Johnnie Walker (42%) The most valuable category was mobile telephone operators; its value grew 28 per cent year on year. This was followed by soft drinks and coffee.


Millward Brown chief executive Joanna Seddon said: "In the current environment, brand has become even more important because it can help to sustain companies in tough times. "Those who continue to invest in their brand will be better positioned for business growth as the economic situation starts to improve than those who have cut spend. The recession does not always harm individual brands as much as it does faceless corporations," she added.

Is India ready for MVNOs?

This is the second post on the series: The advent of MVNOs and discusses the MVNO environs in India!

A few months back, Sunil Bharti Mittal (CMD, Bharti - Airtel) went on record saying that the MVNO model will not find many takers in India (read report). The idea was that with the kinds of tarriffs prevalent in India, MVNOs will not be able to sustain business and be profitable. The fact that Virgin Mobile's foray into MVNO platform has not been as hugely successful bears this statement for the timebeing. But in a long term basis, can MVNOs be ruled out of the country?

A study of 16 countries where MVNOs have been operating for a few years now, conducted by Diamond, a global management consulting firm has some interesting pointers in terms of emergence of the MVNO business models in India.
1. The threshold mobile penetration levels (for the emergence of MVNOs) in these markets are around 40%! --> Markets typically disply a level of mobile penetration above 40% at the time of launh of the first MVNO.
2. Higher levels of industry wide consolidations favour the launch of MVNOs.
3. Less competitive markets (high levels of dissatisfaction amongst consumers) favour MVNOs (because they cater to new customers and innovative solutions).

India with its fastest growing telecom subsribers status is typically a mash of various degrees of penetration. On one end, the A category circles have 70 - 80% penetration ratios and on the other end, C category circles are at 15 - 20% penetration status. Thus India is to be seen a collection of 23 separate markets instead of a single homogenous market when assessing the opportunity for MVNOs. The Cat A and B circles are over ripe for MVNOs and there are states, where the MVNO business would not be as effective given low penetration levels. Also the tarriffs are getting rapidly commoditized and if its were not for the consolidation, these tarriff would be close to unprofitable! Number portability could rapidly increase churn in the eco-system, unsettling the top rug high ARPU consumer bases with the existing operators.

Within these set of circumstances, there may exist an opportunity to serve users better or serve a high profit niche segment. With the penetration levels at 32% nationally and tarriffs touching lows, the MVNO route may be a key differentiator and an access to higher premiums. One needs to be define MVNO at this time. A re-selling, re-branded plain vanilla will not be attractive to users. In the case of Virgin, it has done some excellent work in associating itself with a category of customers. However, its proposition is based on cost which by itself is not the best way to differentiate especially if you are re-selling airtime.

Thus it is important, that the MVNA and MVNE route is taken to differentiate oneself in this market! Healthcare sector is one lucrative idea for MVNA/E, so is department of posts and telegraph, railways, banking etc. There is a need and necessity for including this diversity into the existing eco system. This would constitute differentiated service to consumers for which they would be ready to pay premiums. A focussed attempt centred around the metros and high penetration areas can also keep costs under control and if the collaboration within the players in the eco system is good, can lead to high profit businesses.

Should we reconsider the model once more, Mr Mittal?

The third part of The advent of MVNOs will deal with the legal challenges of establishing this business in India.