Small and medium businesses in India are on track to spend more than $6.4
billion this year on telecom equipment and services, about seven percent more
than they did last year, according to a recent study by New York-based Access
Markets International (AMI) Partners, Inc. “Spending on telecom services such as
cellular services, and local and long-distance telephony accounted for more than
90 percent of total telecom spending last year,” said Dev Chakravarty, Senior
Analyst, AMI-Partners.
Small businesses account for the bulk (about 80 percent) of the telecom
spending among Indian SMBs. This is due to their sheer numbers as SBs account
for more than 99 percent of all SMBs in India. SBs want to set-up a robust
connectivity infrastructure that enables them to interact with their business
partners and other stakeholders. “Cellular penetration within SBs has reached
near-saturation at 98 percent-almost on par with usage of local phones,” said
Chakravarty. The India telecom sector is set to move forward-the SMB sector
itself speaks of adding around 0.5 million new telephone lines in the next 12
months. Future trends indicate a likely advent of 3G communications and the
possible entry of foreign operators into the spectrum fray. These are likely to
bring in good tidings for SMBs as these services will bring in increased
value-added services and tools for SMBs that will help them improve their
offerings to customers as a part of better customer relationship management.
India SMBs are set to adopt unified communications-which integrates multiple
communication systems such as fixed and mobile voice, e-mail, instant messaging,
fax, VoIP, etc-to streamline their methods of information dissemination and
collaboration with remotely located employees. The service sector dominates
overall India SMB unified communication spending-comprising more than four
fifths of the total. Within the former, audio conferencing has a relatively
larger share of the pie; followed by other communication methods like video, web
conferencing and instant messaging. “Usage of video and web conferencing is
still at an embryonic stage within India SMBs but is anticipated to move forward
along with greater availability and affordability of bandwidth; many ISPs are
indeed striving to bring down the broadband costs.”
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SMBs are set
to adopt unified communications |
“SMBs are considering cutting down on business travel to bring down
costs-especially in the wake of spiraling fuel prices,” Chakravarty added.
“Other real-time communication methods like audio and video conferencing can
help them reduce the needs of business travel and face-to-face meetings.”
Among India telecom service providers, BSNL/MTNL continues to be the market
leaders in terms of local and long-distance services. This is followed by Bharti
Telecom. The rest of the market is fragmented with Reliance and Tata battling
for marketshare. However, the overall market leader for telephone equipment is
Beetel-it enjoys a healthy penetration-being used by 40 percent of SMBs.