No marketing. No fanfare. No ad spend.
It's no problem to rack up big numbers in India's mushrooming mobile-phone market.
Take the case of a new cellphone-based social networking service called Bubbly. Described as a kind of Twitter that uses voice messages instead of text, the application was quietly rolled out in February to a few hundred Indian test users.
A month later, more than 500,000 people in India had used the service.
“We built a base of half a millions users by word of mouth,” Thomas Clayton, chief executive officer of Bubble Motion, the company behind Bubbly, said in an interview. “The potential for this is much greater.”
Forget the Internet, laptops and smart phones. In India, the basic cellphone is king and technology firms that produce wireless applications are scrambling to tap the booming market – the fastest growing in the world.
India presents a road map as to how wireless technology could be adapted in other emerging markets economies in Asia and Africa. A fertile mix of necessity and ingenuity have combined to make the humble mobile phone a conduit for music, information and entertainment.
There are now 563.7 million wireless subscribers in the South Asian country, meaning that almost 48 per cent of the population uses a cellphone, according to the latest data from the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India.
“India continues to be the hottest market on the planet,” industry consultant Chetan Sharma said in a recent presentation, referring to the record 19.9 million wireless subscribers that were added in January.
“To give you a perspective, this is almost 1.5 times the number of new subscribers the U.S. added for a whole year. It is like adding an entire Canadian wireless market every month,” Mr. Sharma added.
Deepti Srivastava, a marketing consultant in New Delhi, heard about Bubbly from friends and now uses it to blast out voice messages to let them know where she is and what she is up to.
She also subscribes to a daily news update from the BBC that is delivered in Hindi on her cellphone, through Bubbly.
“The mobile phone is now becoming a kind of Internet in India,” Ms. Srivastava explained in an interview.
Many of her friends have signed up to receive voice blogs from Bollywood movie stars and singers such as Sonu Niigaam, whose voice-message blog has 40,000 followers.
Cellphones were introduced in India more than a decade ago but the country's wireless phone industry is still growing by almost 50 per cent per year, as tight price regulation coupled with fierce competition has made the devices and services more affordable.
As India's economy has enjoyed rapid gains, coverage has also expanded to rural areas, where annual growth rates are as high as 71 per cent.
Smart phones, such as the Blackberry or iPhone, that can link to the Internet and have revived wireless phone sales in North America and Europe, are not responsible for the bulk of the stunning growth in India. Instead, most wireless users have basic cellphones.
But they use their mobiles in ways that are unique to much of the industrialized world. For many Indians, the cellphone isn't simply a speaking and texting device. It's also an entertainment and information centre, with information delivered through SMS or voice messages, rather than through wireless Internet connections.
To increase revenues from their massive subscriber bases, Indian wireless operators such as market leader Bharti Airtel and rival Vodafone are rolling out hundreds of new applications and services.
These include music, games, trivia and information such as news, cricket scores, religious messages and Bollywood gossip updates.
“We've seen 2.5 million downloads in the space of a month and I don't think there is a parallel to this anywhere else in the world,” Atul Bindal, president of mobile services at Bharti Airtel, which has launched 1,500 mobile applications, recently told India's Economic Times.
The success of wireless applications accessible on a basic handset is due in part to India's relatively low Internet penetration rate. As of February, there were fewer than 8.6 million broadband Internet subscribers in the country of 1.1 billion people.
Internet access is too costly for much of India's population and the country's relatively poor land-line infrastructure and challenged electricity grid means Internet service is unavailable or unreliable in many areas. As well, many Indian websites use English or Hindi as their primary language – which excludes hundreds of millions of potential users who speak other languages.
“One of the major drivers of the mobile phone market is the fact that there is no localization of the Internet in India,” Prabir Purkayastha, vice-president of the Delhi Science Forum, said in an interview.
“The cost to consumers to enter the mobile market is much lower.”
A basic cellphone costs about 1,200 rupees (about $27), in a country where the average annual income is about $1,020. The average subscriber spends about 200 rupees on phone service. (About 90 per cent of subscribers pay in advance for minutes and services, rather than getting a monthly bill.)
Indian wireless operators have succeeded by catering content and services to specific regions and language groups. The majority of India's wireless phone-app downloads, for example, come from less-developed areas called Tier II states, such as Gujarat and Rajastan. The mobile companies hope revenue from such services will keep their growth rates strong as the number of new subscribers level off.
“Talking won't be enough,” Mr. Purkayastha said.
Indeed, revenue from non-voice services is expected to rise 70 per cent in 2010 from 2008 levels, to 165-billion rupees (about $3.7-billion).
Meanwhile, application creators such as Bubble Motion hope to make money through revenue sharing agreements with the wireless providers.
For each voice message downloaded, for example, Bharti Airtel charges the listener about half a rupee (about 1.5 cents).
Bubble Motion gets only a small percentage of that, but as Mr. Clayton, the company's Singapore-based CEO, notes: “It's all about volume.”
