Springboards in place!
Amidst business as usual, the No. 2 telco worked to equip itself for the next round of growth, with focus on customer experience
For the world’s second largest mobile service provider, there were two key pieces of news in India—a good one and a bad one. The good news was that Vodafone got a major government clearance to raise stake in Indian subsidiary, just a few months after the UK-headquartered telecom major announced its ‘Project Spring’ program.
(No later than April 2014, the India unit would have become a wholly owned subsidiary, which would ensure that returns from a bumped-up capex would stay, and would be fully leveraged by the company.)
Securing the clearance for raising stake in India subsidiary added fuel to the rising speculations that the industry is gearing up for a phase of consolidation and that global players like Vodafone would be eying the opportunities strategically, with a wholly owned subsidiary being a foundational step forward.
The bad news was that the issue of Rs 11,200 crore retro tax pending against the company stayed unresolved—and a stalemate continues till date. In 2012, India government had changed rules to bring Vodafone’s 2007 acquisition of Hutchison Whampoa’s stake in Hutchison Essar under the tax net.
While a somewhat cautious Vodafone India was initially relatively slow to grow its 3G presence in the country, the rollouts gain more acceleration as the year went by. The company was part of an inter-circle 3G roaming pact with Bharti Airtel and Idea Cellular to offer 3G services in circles but the pact remained ineffective.
Vodafone India added ICICI Bank in India as the banking partner in April 2013 for its M-Pesa service, for which HDFC Bank has been its first partner. The telco also leveraged its global M2M service capabilities to build differentiations across its enterprise service offerings.
As a glimpse of what Vodafone could be offering in the area of M2M in India, it recently partnered with Cambridge-based software design company Cyan to tap into the smart metering market in India. The two parties have signed an agreement that would effectively enable them to go to market together and submit proposals to customers with smart metering market needs or plans. The two companies would also develop and deliver the solution as a managed service.
Vodafone India also focused more on raising the bar on the customer experience front in an integrated and wholesome manner. In a significant step in this direction, the company invested in the creation of a new super network operations center (SNOC), which also housed a super network experience center (SNEC). While the SNOC gave Vodafone what it termed as the “single source of truth” for the health of its network, the SNEC enables its enterprise service customers to witness what the suite of Vodafone’s solutions offers to them and how it actually works.
As an example of how the SNEC would work to facilitate customer decision making, the smart metering solution jointly offered by Vodafone and Cyan would be demonstrated at the SNEC facility.