VAS provider IMImobile has teamed up with Airtel to introduce Cell Shakti (shakti roughly means “power”), a service that caters to the needs of rural Indians who have long suffered from poor access to infrastructure, education and information.
Owing to low literacy rates in rural India, the service will be voice-based, and offer both information (such as the weather) as well as education on issues such as proper health care, and law & order. Like most enterprises in India, Cell Shakti has dual goals of both making money (the service costs 1INR per day, or about €0.018) as well as to affect positive social development by enabling rural Indians to make more informed decisions in their daily lives.
Presently the service is only available on Airtel in the southern Indian state of Andhra Pradesh, but IMImobile has stated that it will soon expand to other states in India.
What we think:
The service is noble, but not the first of its kind. In fact it is in direct competition with Nokia India’s portfolio of services dubbed Nokia Life Tools that has the same services and goals as Cell Shakti. The main difference between the two is that Cell Shakti attempts to give service providers “ownership” of the customer (that is, the predominant relationship with the customer), while Nokia wants ownership of customers to belong to handset makers (ideally Nokia itself).
The stakes for winning this market are certainly high, as whoever “owns” the customer is in the best position to introduce new revenue opportunities such as mobile commerce and banking. While the money is in the wealthier urban areas, the opportunity to control the market lay in rural India, where teledensity is only 13% and poised for massive growth in years to come. The winner of the rural markets will gain considerable advantages of scale to tip the scales in its favor within the more lucrative urban areas.
It is difficult to say whether the service-centric or phone-centric model of customer ownership will win. It is also possible that none will win, instead forcing both models to compete for customers—and the more they have to compete, the more India’s consumers win.
