Yahoo! banks on mobile business

In a country where the PC to Mobile ratio is 2:11, it only makes good business sense to have a strong presence in the mobile sphere if you are serious PC business  player.

Vishal Maheshwari senior director (Connected Life) of Yahoo! India said that the Indian PC to mobile market has unique statistical revelation compared to rest of the world, and the Indian mobile market is the fastest growing mobile market with nearly 10 million mobile subscribers added in the month of Nov 08 (Source: TRAI Nov 2008).

Maheshwari said that that the exponential growth in mobile is however fragmented into different devices having different OS. Hence due to non standardisation in mobile, the content providers and advertisers suffer OS specification constraints and fail to reach all mobile users.

Yahoo! is banking on its open source-based, mobile content framework - Blueprint - to tap this burgeoning market. This framework will give content developers and advertisers a single, platform, and enable better synchronization with mobile phones having different OS. He said that major mobile service providers like IDEA, BPL has singed up to offer services to their customers using this technology.

He said that the Indian mobile VAS market was worth $210 million in 2006, and will reach $ 600 million in 2010. This is thanks to the advent of 3G services in India earlier this month.

Gopal Krishna, vice-president and head of audience for emerging markets, Yahoo!, spoke about the new products launched in 2008. According to him, compared to 2007, when only two new products were launched by Yahoo! India, 2008 has seen a rise in the number of products launched.

For instance, Yahoo! launched its mobile search, called Yahoo! oneSearch, in association with Reliance Communications, and also introduced an integrated search process called Glue Pages Beta, which collates and integrates the most relevant information from across the web onto a single 'visual' search results page.

The company claimed that according to comScore data released in October 2008, Yahoo! India Mail is the No. 1 email service and Yahoo! Instant Messenger (IM) is the No. 1 IM provider in India. Among film websites, excluding streaming film and video websites such as YouTube.com and Rajshri.com, Yahoo! India Movies has become the No. 1 website in the IRTS category. Even Yahoo! Cricket is the No. 1 in its category.

Yahoo! Mail reaches more than 80 per cent of the total monthly online Indian population which accesses email, while Yahoo! India IM reaches more than 81 per cent of the total monthly online Indian population which uses IM facilities on the Internet. The movies website has 2.34 million unique visitors and the cricket website receives 1.97 unique visitors per month.

About future plans, Krishna said that in 2009, Yahoo! India will increase its marketing activities because it wants to enjoy top of the mind recall among its target group and focus on the mobile segment. He added that the company would make two announcements in early 2009, but refused to share details. However, he indicated that Yahoo! India might launch a new vertical or create marketing alliances with different companies in India.