Vodafone India introduces smallest value prepaid card ever

Vodafone has announced a new value card for its prepaid subscribers. At a price of 4 Indian Rupees (or roughly €0.07), it is the lowest-priced card ever released in the Indian market.

The Rs. 4 will buy users either 100 local/national SMS (yes, in India there is a different going rate for each), 8 minutes of local/national calls, or calls to other Vodafone customers at the discounted rate of 30 paise (100 paise = 1 Rupee) per minute. The validity of the Rs. 4 bonus is for 24 hours

Vodafone has eschewed the costs of printing and distributing a physical card for the service, rather telling interested users to activate the bonus service by dialing 121 from their handsets.

Vodafone has kicked off the promotion with a new TV commercial featuring an animated cantankerous parrot.

What we think: Sometimes it is difficult for us in the developed world to think about the economics of the Indian mobile market (and those of the developing world in general) in anything but the most abstract terms. Seeing promotions like this helps us put things into perspective. An amount of money that is tantamount to a rounding error on our bills is of sufficient size in India to build a promotional campaign out of it. Anybody looking to enter the Indian market really must consider the radically different structure of this market. Can your product work at much smaller costs and a much higher volume? If not, it might be time to go back to the drawing board.