Hyderabad-based VAS player, Netxcell Ltd. CEO, Mr Debasis Chatterji in an interaction with TelecomTiger

Q1)  India’s VAS market is heavily commodised. How do you stand apart in such a scenario?

Ans: We would like to provide niche services to the mobile operators with business intelligence built into which differentiates us from the rest.  We also plan to partner with traditional media companies and leverage on the opportunities available. Netxcell is known for its technological advantage and its proactive support that it offers to the clients. Since all the products that we have deployed have been developed by us, we are confident of resolving any issues within the least TAT and hence are much more confident of our service support at all times. We have aptly positioned ourselves as a player who could develop any product in 60 days flat!

Q2) Do you plan to forge tie-ups for the domestic market similar to the deal with Africa’s AquaSanTec?

Ans: With Indian VAS market pegged at around Rs.12,000 crore overall including the peer to peer SMS, and around Rs.5000 crore pure-play VAS and we are already doing so and  plan to increase our efforts within India and in other parts of the world. In this effort we have already tied up with Clockwork Mobile – a mobile content management company where we will be managing all Clockwork Mobile’s content, from digitizing audio content, uploading content to operator’s portals, to producing/generating mobile content, including voice based applications as required by Clockwork Mobile for mobile operators in domestic as well as international markets.

Q3) Apart from Africa which other international markets are on your radar?

Ans:We have deployments in Hong Kong, Madagascar, Middle East etc which means that our focus is all over the world. And as African mobile markets are growing at a fast pace and some countries in the region are considered to be the fastest growing mobile markets in the world. We are targeting only 7 of the 31 African countries as we are looking at getting established in only 3-4 countries of the 7 countries as of now.

Q4) Your revenues mainly come from Aircel and Airtel. How do you plan to reduce dependency on these couple of operators and have a more balanced revenue flow?

Ans: Our revenues comes from Aircel, Airtel, TATA, Idea etc… which means that more or less all the established operators in India. We also have Hosted Business Model and hence our revenue is spread evenly across operators / platforms. Earlier a few years back, Netxcell’s revenue was from operators only but now it is generated equally among operators, Enterprise VAS and Project Sales thus ensuring that the risk is minimized.

Q5) Do you plan to go for another series of fund raising?

Ans: The valuation for Netxcell is already being done and we have been placed with the best valuation in the Industry. Hence we do plan and are looking at fund raising. We are also working on the re-branding exercise and will be a full fledged entity by the end of June 2010.

Q6) How do you plan to position yourself in an App Store environment?

Ans: We are evaluating options and will come out with a strategy by end of Q2.