Though it is also true that critics like Harit Shah, Telecom Analyst, Angel Broking, have been apprehensive to B&E about the fact that “the gap between Bharti and R-Com is currently increasing, with Bharti adding over 2 million users a month, while R-Com is adding only 1.5 million.” But then, one cannot ever forget that it has taken Anil simply ‘4’ years to cover up on all the sustainable advantages previous players had till date. Just imagine the possibilities that this man can achieve in another four years, especially with his undying and unwavering focus on the potential power of convergence!
And it’s not that with CDMA, R-Com has had to flounder
on the technology and innovation front. Oh yes, there were the extreme rumours that apart from simple voice calls, the CDMA technology is not fundamentally efficient enough to support value added services like net access, data transfers and similar services! Interestingly, far from all this, the CDMA technology is in fact brilliantly superior to its GSM counterpart. As the R-Com President Shukla comments, “In mobility today, technology has been a very big challenge. But to our advantage, while an ordinary GSM service has a data speed of only 9.6 kbps, CDMA in fact offers a maximum data speed of 144 kbps! So the technology difference (between CDMA and GSM) is not just in percentages, but in huge multiples.”
This tremendous bandwidth advantage has been exploited right from the star, as R-Com perhaps was the first to bring the concept of advanced valued added services (VAS) to the consumer, even at a time when competitors were only toying with the idea. When we spent an afternoon with Mahesh Prasad, Head, Content Application and Solution, R-Com, he shared with us, “When we launched in 2003, we were the first to provide complete multimedia experience on the handset – people could watch videos, send picture MMS, e-mails, could enjoy excel access, music, play games and even undertake the transactions that they would have normally done on an internet platform.” That was then. But with the increased focus on such services and even competitors excelling in the VAS area, what’s the scenario at R-Com now? Mahesh divulges, “Today, we have the mobile TV experience where you can watch news as it is happening, play games, and all in a video format. In fact, even undertake some of the most complex transactions in the financial space, such as M-banking, M-commerce, credit card payments, direct debits to your bank account, transactions which require utmost security in the network that is accepted by the financial community.”
Look at how well such an orientation has helped R-Com. When the company started its services in 2003, its presence was just in 300 towns. Today, the expanse has grown to a super 13,000 towns and 500,000 villages. Angel Broking analyst Harit Shah grudgingly accepts, “R-Com’s network is undoubtedly amongst the vastest in the country...” Add to this the fact that Anil Ambani has now officially quoted that R-Com would this year have “the largest roll out in the world in possibly the shortest period of time,” as they now plan to reach a soul stopping figure of 23,000 towns with an overall coverage that touches almost 90% of India’s population. If that is not visionary, pray what is! But it is not just the distribution that R-Com is betting on. R-Com is the undisputed leader of the ‘handset bundling’ strategy that has driven down the entry level point for mobile connectivity to a new low of Rs.777!
For Complete IIPM Article, Click on IIPM Article
Source : IIPM Editorial, 2008
And it’s not that with CDMA, R-Com has had to flounder
on the technology and innovation front. Oh yes, there were the extreme rumours that apart from simple voice calls, the CDMA technology is not fundamentally efficient enough to support value added services like net access, data transfers and similar services! Interestingly, far from all this, the CDMA technology is in fact brilliantly superior to its GSM counterpart. As the R-Com President Shukla comments, “In mobility today, technology has been a very big challenge. But to our advantage, while an ordinary GSM service has a data speed of only 9.6 kbps, CDMA in fact offers a maximum data speed of 144 kbps! So the technology difference (between CDMA and GSM) is not just in percentages, but in huge multiples.”This tremendous bandwidth advantage has been exploited right from the star, as R-Com perhaps was the first to bring the concept of advanced valued added services (VAS) to the consumer, even at a time when competitors were only toying with the idea. When we spent an afternoon with Mahesh Prasad, Head, Content Application and Solution, R-Com, he shared with us, “When we launched in 2003, we were the first to provide complete multimedia experience on the handset – people could watch videos, send picture MMS, e-mails, could enjoy excel access, music, play games and even undertake the transactions that they would have normally done on an internet platform.” That was then. But with the increased focus on such services and even competitors excelling in the VAS area, what’s the scenario at R-Com now? Mahesh divulges, “Today, we have the mobile TV experience where you can watch news as it is happening, play games, and all in a video format. In fact, even undertake some of the most complex transactions in the financial space, such as M-banking, M-commerce, credit card payments, direct debits to your bank account, transactions which require utmost security in the network that is accepted by the financial community.”
Look at how well such an orientation has helped R-Com. When the company started its services in 2003, its presence was just in 300 towns. Today, the expanse has grown to a super 13,000 towns and 500,000 villages. Angel Broking analyst Harit Shah grudgingly accepts, “R-Com’s network is undoubtedly amongst the vastest in the country...” Add to this the fact that Anil Ambani has now officially quoted that R-Com would this year have “the largest roll out in the world in possibly the shortest period of time,” as they now plan to reach a soul stopping figure of 23,000 towns with an overall coverage that touches almost 90% of India’s population. If that is not visionary, pray what is! But it is not just the distribution that R-Com is betting on. R-Com is the undisputed leader of the ‘handset bundling’ strategy that has driven down the entry level point for mobile connectivity to a new low of Rs.777!
For Complete IIPM Article, Click on IIPM Article
Source : IIPM Editorial, 2008
An IIPM and Professor Arindam Chaudhuri (Renowned Management Guru and Economist) Initiative
Read these article :-
ZEE BUSINESS BEST B SCHOOL SURVEY
B-schooled in India, Placed Abroad (Print Version)
IIPM in Financial times (Print Version)
IIPM makes business education truly global (Print Version)
The Indian Institute of Planning and Management (IIPM)
IIPM Campus
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IIPM makes business education truly global-Education-The Times of ...
The Hindu : Education Plus : Honour for IIPM
IIPM ranked No.1 B-School in India, Management News - By ...
IIPM Ranked No1 B-School in India
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IIPM ranked No1 B-School in India :: Education, Careers ...
The Hindu Business Line : IIPM placements hit a high of over 2000 jobs
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India eNews - IIPM Ranked No1 B-School in India
IIPM Delhi - Indian Institute of Planning and Management New Delhi ...
domain-b.com : IIPM ranked ahead of IIMs
Read these article :-
ZEE BUSINESS BEST B SCHOOL SURVEY
B-schooled in India, Placed Abroad (Print Version)
IIPM in Financial times (Print Version)
IIPM makes business education truly global (Print Version)
The Indian Institute of Planning and Management (IIPM)
IIPM Campus
Top Articles on IIPM:-
IIPM makes business education truly global-Education-The Times of ...
The Hindu : Education Plus : Honour for IIPM
IIPM ranked No.1 B-School in India, Management News - By ...
IIPM Ranked No1 B-School in India
Moneycontrol >> News >> Press- News >> IIPM ranked No1 B-School in ...
IIPM ranked No. 1 B-school in India- Zee Business Survey ...
IIPM ranked No1 B-School in India :: Education, Careers ...
The Hindu Business Line : IIPM placements hit a high of over 2000 jobs
Deccan Herald - IIPM ranked as top B-School in India
India eNews - IIPM Ranked No1 B-School in India
IIPM Delhi - Indian Institute of Planning and Management New Delhi ...
domain-b.com : IIPM ranked ahead of IIMs
John Howard, in the recently held elections, the Australians may have tipped their country away from the blinkered, trepidation and avarice that he had encouraged many Australians at least think & hope so. Kevin Rudd’s Labour Party swept to victory in Federal election, providing a humiliating rout to Howard, who in an added mortification, is poised to lose the legislative seat he has held for 33 years.
the century mark, the global oil politics is in full swing. The political wrestling was in full display at the recently concluded OPEC summit, where on one hand, Venezuela & Iran desired some action over the dwindling fate of dollar by pricing oil in a basket of currencies. And the time tested US ally, Saudi Arabia, aptly preventing the dollar from appearing on the agenda.
schoolroom without a teacher. One would expect shrieks and screams, fights and struggles, or more like a fish market. But the scene in a government primary school in Madabal, Magadi taluka, Karnataka, was totally different. Divided into four groups, these kids were quietly engrossed in front of their respective computers. One of the groups was identifying animals, the second solving a mathematical problem, the third was listening to a lesson with headphones on, and the fourth was engaged in a discussion on elephants.
existing 34 fund houses reveals that there are schemes, which have offered returns higher than stock markets despite the market mayhem. Interestingly, most of the outperformers are actually equity-based funds. And analysts are hopeful about other equity-based funds will also bounce back soon. Sharing his views with 4Ps B&M, Sudip Bandyopadhyay, CEO, Reliance Money avers, “Barring past two quarters, the returns from the diversified equity MF have been over 40% CAGR over past five years… we should understand equity per se is associated with risk; but we believe this is a temporary correction more to do with global factors than over our own economy and in the medium to long term we believe equities will definitely give better returns as compared to other assets classes.” His words justify the basic investment rule: if you want handsome returns, invest with a long term perspective.
Computer Entertainment (SCE). Today, Sony is known worldwide for its Playstation gaming console. “The core strength we have is our range of products which cater to every segment of the target group of consumers,” avers Bose, an opinion which seems true at least at this point in time, because Microsoft’s only answer to Sony’s consoles at the moment is its Xbox 360 (which competes with Sony’s PS3). However, its other ‘now’ low-priced products like the PSP and PS2 have no competition from Microsoft. Talking about competition, Bose clarifies with a smile, “Claiming the market share at this point will be doing injustice to my competitors, because we are too big for them...Roughly we hold around 70% of the Indian console gaming market!” Surely, there is no doubt who the market leader is! To make matters worse for the also-rans, Sony is also releasing another one of its Indianised version of videogames (‘Hanuman’ after ‘Buzz!’ and ‘Filmstar’), as it rightly believes that pinning hopes on Indianised (as well as culture-oriented) contents will create enough differentiating truths!
requires careful balancing and under Chopra’s leadership, the company has been doubling up as a wealth advisor, as also a distributor of financial products. However, he insists on being referred to as a wealth management firm as opposed to an Asset Management Company (AMC). “We could have been an AMC a long time ago, but it would have diluted our positioning,” he says, adding that unlike an AMC, understanding the need, taxation impact, and risk appetite of investors, are the key factors that Bajaj Capital focuses on before advising any of its one million clients in the country. And his advice for investing in these inflationary times? “Ad hoc investing is a complete no-no, instead focusing on long term investments with a clear roadmap: defined goals, time required for achieving them, take inflation into account, and then work backwards.”
sector and cater to the same line of business. Mark Hurd, CEO, HP comments, “There’s tremendous leverage you get from scale… We’re spreading our cost structure across a much larger revenue base. We expect to bring that capability to EDS.” Supports David Mitchell, Senior VP, Ovum IT Research, London, “Scale is fundamentally important in the IT industry, and especially in IT services. It allows a supplier like IBM or HP, to take on the largest projects and invest in assets that can repeatedly be deployed in different customer settings. Acquisition of EDS immediately take HP closer to IBM in scale and adds a huge amount of IT services capability – at a stroke.” EDS’s core competence lies in infrastructure management services and custom application services. But the company is weak in providing services for packaged applications, which may be a stumbling block in the consulting space.
plan to power the agency ahead? Any specific (hitherto untapped) thrust areas to leverage in the task of moving ahead? Any unique vision? Joshi honestly confesses that there was no special blueprint because this was a very critical decision and demanded a total connect with the DNA of the organisation. Being an intrinsic part of the core team, he had some ideas about what best could (and should) define the agency’s persona, but this vision was in the process of being formulated. “I was, however, very clear about one thing: We must attempt to give every single client of ours a clear and distinctive voice that instantly defines their personality & what they stand for.” Today, with campaigns for Coca-Cola, NDTV, Radio Mirchi, Saffola, Parachute, MasterCard, Chyawanprash, et al, under McCann’s belt, there is an unmistakable stamp that spells out their persona, loud n’ clear. You see or hear ads and you identify the brand instantly! Boss yeh to NDTV ka ad hai! “In short to find the voice of the brand and present it in an engaging, entertaining, empowering way…”
family sold off its entire stake (around 65%) in Dabur Pharma to Fresenius Kabi. The German group further raised its holding to 73.3% and even made an open offer for an additional 20% in an attempt to engulf whole of it. Looks like the predator is not satisfied with just a pound of flesh, but wants the entire roast. So, is it that the long due consolidation in the Rs.320 billion Indian pharma industry has finally arrived? Or is it that the global & domestic predators are conditioning themselves before the final hunt, which they anyway have been doing since long?
MakeMyTrip (MMT) and Yatra surpassed everyone’s expectations and knocked-off offline travel agents in a single blow. Like the Spartans who had put a million strong Persian army to the test in Hollywood flick 300, online players too did somewhat similar. What seemed a fight against destiny, travel portals proved every critic – from industry pundits to offline travel agents – wrong. Now, it’s the start of round two and the champions of round one are rolling up their sleeves to put up another immaculate performance. We’ll see how...