Over the last couple of months, I have been talking and meeting a lot mobile service providers in India across many forums. While most of them are in an acquisition binge, the challenges they seem to face are similar - irrespective of the vintage of operation or subscriber size. They either talk to me of huge shift from post-paid subscribers to pre-paid subscribers, reducing revenue from voice services, increasing usage of VAS and data services, lack of differentiation in their own offerings for customers to choose or switch, customer churn and many more! To add to the confusion, there are new service providers entering the fray. How do these service providers build value for their customers and become compelling? Visionmobile provides an interesting perspective and approach to consider - Value Quadrants:
Value Quadrants maps value creation and revenue model changes by asking WHEN and WHERE is value being created. The WHEN of value creation is function of the handset lifecycle, from design, development and production (pre-sales phase) to point-of-sale and in-life use (post-sales phase). There WHERE of value creation is either on the device (hardware, software, patents and industrial design) or on the services ‘cloud’ (for designing and delivering content and services).
In one quadrant, value is created by intellectual property, in the other value is built out of licensing and in the other one it is out of infrastructure. Many companies have started to take position in these quadrants.
The revenue models that emerge out of these value quadrants are quite different and unique:
To me this is an interesting map for mobility service providers in India to evaluate their offerings and determine what migration and transition of services that they need to make or build to create value and stickiness in their offerings for customers either thro' alliances, product/service development, new revenue-sharing models etc.
Guess, there's lot to think now!