Ericsson eyes mega bucks from multimedia business in India

Communications network provider Ericsson is betting big on its revenues from the multimedia business in India. Ericsson has been witnessing a growth of around 20-25% in this segment globally and expects the trend to continue in coming years. India accounts for a significant part of Ericsson’s business.
Jan Wareby, senior vice-president-multimedia, said, “India has been the largest market for the multimedia business in the last quarter. So, a significant part of the business comes from India.” During the last financial year, the multimedia business, which was launched two years back, contributed around 10% of the company’s $30 billion business globally. During the same period, India, the US and China contributed 7% each to the overall global revenues.
To increase its focus on the Indian market, the firm is set to launch a number of multimedia applications. It is currently in talks with telecom operators to unveil its social media interface application and family finder in the next few weeks. It also plans to launch application stores in India that will support 2G handsets across different phone brands unlike the Apple’s App Stores, which support Apple phones only. Ericsson has tied up with Tandberg Solutions to provide IPTV solutions globally.
“The social media interface will allow operators to bring white base application that will interface across community websites like Facebook, Orkut and Twitter, among others. This will be available through WAP on mobile phones and also on the Web,” said Wareby. The interface will allow subscribers to access and bring changes on all the community sites at the same time.
Ericsson is also looking forward to its revenue management portfolio through data mining fields that study the user pattern of consumers. This study will enable operators to bring dynamic offers to woo subscribers. The firm’s research and development team in India comprising about 300 people has been working on the same.
Ericsson has tied up with a technical university in Chennai to work on data mining fields. “Operators can use the data statistically and our applications and R&D will enable them to do that. We expect to launch the service early next year,” Wareby said. Ericsson’s R&D centre in India is the second largest in the world. Every year, the firm invests about 20% of its sales revenues into global R&D.

NITIKA DARMOLI
PGDM
SECTION-B
3RD SEM