139% Growth for Mobile Non-Voice Market

Indicating a trend towards the growing acceptance of mobile value added
services and applications, among subscribers, the mobile non-voice market
(including Short Messaging Service, Multimedia Messaging Service and Other data
services) registered a 139% growth in CY 2004, over CY 2003, as per IDC's
recent research report on the mobile data market. SMS leads the non-voice
charge, being the biggest contributor to the overall revenues of the non-voice
market, and is expected to continue doing so in the near future. Overall, the
non-voice revenue contribution presently stands at around 4.7% of the total
mobile services revenue-which is around Rs 14,560 crore.

According to Mugdh Rajit, analyst, Communication Research, IDC (India), the
declining Average Revenue Per User (ARPU) and the margins on voice calls has led
the service providers to think of alternate revenue streams with better margins.
Traditionally, the thrust by the service providers has been on vanilla voice
services offerings.

In terms of revenue break-up: SMS contributed around 70.4%; MMS 2.3 %; other
data services like wallpapers, ring tones, games, peer-to-application SMS, etc
together contributed 27.2%. IDC has identified "other data services"
as the fastest growing segment in this space, and it is expected to grow from
its present Rs 191 crore to Rs 2,302 crore by 2008, a CAGR of 65%.

According to Rajit, among the other data services monophonic ring tones are
the most popular with an annual traffic of over 19 mn.

Team DQ