90% growth expected in m-commerce in APAC

The second panel discussion at The Mobile Conclave 2010 � Mobile Advertising and VAS Conference was on ‘Mobile Value Added Services – Touching all corners of life’. The session saw senior executives from the industry discussing services existing in the market and new services to be launched in the near future. They also analysed mobile services such as alerts, banking, product promotions and entertainment.
The panel was moderated by Anagat Pareek, global business head, UshaComm; and comprised Milind Pathak, vice-president, Comviva; Jagdish Mitra, chief executive officer, CanvasM; Amit Mehta, head, sales and marketing, VAS, SDP and mobility, Tata Consultancy Services; Sachin Gupta, national head ,SMS and USSD, Tata Docomo and Sudarshan Dharmapuri, vice-president, IMImobile.
Pathak spoke on the mobile commerce industry in the country and said, “Mobile services and mobile finance is the way to go. In years to come, more than 90 per cent growth is expected in m-commerce in Asia Pacific region.”
Mitra took the discussion forward by speaking on the need for convergence in the digital space. He said, “Convergence is the key in India but we have to find out a suitable mechanism for converging.” He also spoke on why is convergence not successful in India, and added that factors such as digital divide, narrow transmission bands or bandwidth, low uptake of services and regulatory hurdles are making it difficult to bring about convergence here.
Gupta was the next to speak and he brought the focus on strategies that can help increase VAS revenues. He said that to increase VAS ARPU (average revenue per user), it is important to change the customer mindset on incoming promo calls, develop different models on VAS adoption, introduce differential mobile VAS, make subscribing and unsubscribing simpler, take a consumer segmented approach and launch a separate customer care service for VAS.