Amid all the economic gloom, one business is still booming — India’s mobile phones — thanks to the world’s lowest call rates driven by fierce competition among cellular operators, experts said.
And while economists forecast a sharp slowdown in India’s economic growth, no downturn is seen in the mobile market, which added a record 15.4 million wireless users in January — the biggest monthly growth ever, the latest official data showed.
“India represents a unique mobile market where competition is the highest and the tariffs are the lowest,” said T.V. Ramachandran, head of the Cellular Operators Association of India.
PHOTO : AFP
And it’s not just affluent Indians who are buying phones in the world’s fastest growing cellular market — India outstripped China last April.
Most of the growth has been driven by laborers, maids, drivers and other lowly paid people in cities and increasingly in rural areas as innovative marketing has made phoning cheap enough for some of the poorest pockets.
“One of the biggest factors in this growth has been affordability both in terms of handset and tariff plans,” said Girish Trivedi, a senior analyst at consultancy Frost & Sullivan.
Customers can pay less than US$0.02 for a call and US$13 for a new mobile handset. Second-hand ones can cost far less.
For many, mobile phones mean their livelihood.
Sixty-two-year-old house painter Akshaye Jha runs his two-man business in New Delhi from his mobile phone.
“It means people can get in touch with me. I get more jobs,” Jha said.
“The mobile has become a device for the masses ... an agent of change,” transforming ways of communicating and doing business, Ramachandran said.
People are also buying phones even when they don’t need them for work.
Munshi, a security guard, never learned how to read numbers and gets other people to dial. He keeps his handset in his breast pocket and starts with surprise when it rings with a bouncy Hindi pop tune.
“It keeps me in touch with my family in the village,” he smiles after getting a call from a nephew.
In rural areas, meanwhile, people are snapping up phones at an ever quicker pace as mobile firms aggressively roll out networks, sharing costs of infrastructure to reach far-flung areas quickly and cheaply, experts said.
Farmers are using mobile phones to call other farmers to find out the market price for crops like rice, fruit and coconuts.
Market players say tumbling stock markets and property prices are not stopping many poor Indians signing up for phones as they don’t own shares or real estate and are not being hit.
“The people in rural India are not being affected by the global crunch,” Sanjay Gupta, chief marketing officer of Bharti Airtel, India’s leading cellular provider, said in an interview.
India’s “mobile revolution” is still mainly seen in the cities, but the real prize for phone companies is the vast rural market, where nearly 70 percent of the 1.1-billion-strong population live, analysts said.
By the end of January, 34.5 percent of the population owned a telephone, Telecom Regulatory Authority of India said.
But those figures distort the picture, with 66 percent of people in cities owning a phone compared to around 9 percent in rural areas, Frost & Sullivan said.
“The next addition of subscribers will come from rural regions,” Trivedi said.
The government calls the rural market the “next accelerator” for mobile growth.
Total wireless connections stand at 362.30 million, up from 233.63 million a year earlier. Combined with fixed line users, the country now has more than 400 million telephone connections.
The Ministry of Transportation and Communications yesterday inaugurated the Danjiang Bridge across the Tamsui River in New Taipei City, saying that the structure would be an architectural icon and traffic artery for Taiwan. Feted as a major engineering achievement, the Danjiang Bridge is 920m long, 211m tall at the top of its pylon, and is the longest single-pylon asymmetric cable-stayed bridge in the world, the government’s Web site for the structure said. It was designed by late Iraqi-British architect Zaha Hadid. The structure, with a maximum deck of 70m, accommodates road and light rail traffic, and affords a 200m navigation channel for boats,
PRECISION STRIKES: The most significant reason to deploy HIMARS to outlying islands is to establish a ‘dead zone’ that the PLA would not dare enter, a source said A High Mobility Artillery Rocket System (HIMARS) would be deployed to Penghu County and Dongyin Island (東引) in Lienchiang County (Matsu) to force the Chinese military to retreat at least 100km from the coastline, a military source said yesterday. Taiwan has been procuring HIMARS and Army Tactical Missile Systems (ATACMS) from the US in batches. Once all batches have been delivered, Taiwan would possess 111 HIMARS units and 504 ATACMS, which have a range of 300km. Considering that “offense is the best defense,” the military plans to forward-deploy the systems to outlying islands such as Penghu and Dongyin so that
WHAT WAS ALL THAT FOR? Jaw Shaw-kong said that Cheng Li-wen had pushed for more drastic cuts and attacked him, just for the outcome to be nearly identical to his bill The legislature yesterday passed a supplementary budget bill to fund the purchase of separate packages of US military equipment, with the combined amount of spending capped at NT$780 billion (US$24.8 billion). The Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) used their legislative majority to pass the bill, which runs until 2033 and has two main funding provisions. One was for NT$300 billion of arms sales already approved by the US for Taiwan on Dec. 17 last year, the other was for NT$480 billion for another arms package expected to be announced by Washington. The bill, which fell short of the NT$1.25
‘CLEAR MESSAGE’: The bill would set up an interagency ‘tiger team’ to review sanctions tools and other economic options to help deter any Chinese aggression toward Taiwan US Representative Young Kim has introduced a bill to deter Chinese aggression against Taiwan, calling for an interagency “tiger team” to preplan coordinated sanctions and economic measures in response to possible Chinese military or political action against Taiwan. “[Chinese President] Xi Jinping [習近平] has directed the People’s Liberation Army to be ready to invade Taiwan by 2027. China has a plan. America should have one too,” Kim said in a news release on Thursday last week. She introduced the “Deter PRC [People’s Republic of China] aggression against Taiwan act” to “ensure the US has a coordinated sanctions strategy ready should
RSS