Squashing BoP Myth no.7

The Payoff for Investing in Poor Countries : HBS Working Knowledge: "Conventional wisdom says that people in BOP markets cannot use such advanced technologies, but that's just another misconception."

How Anil Ambani plans to woo rural India: "If you thought customers in semi-urban and rural markets were using mobile phones only to make calls, think again. If Reliance Communications Ventures Ltd is to be believed, this is a myth, which has been broken.

Much to its surprise, the company realised that a sizeable portion of its customers in the towns and villages of the Bimaru (Bihar, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Uttar Pradesh) states were using cellphones to log on to the Net, stream video clippings and for infotainment.

GSM companies might be concentrating only on voice revenues in their quest to address the rural markets. Reliance, however, is banking on data and video to do the magic. Not that it is giving up on voice. It only means that the company is increasingly expecting a large part of the revenue to come from data. This is the key plank of Reliance's big new push into the hinterland of the country.

The company means serious business. It currently has its network available in over 240,000 towns and villages across the country constituting for 42 per cent of the rural population. But by the end of the year, it wants to nearly double the rural coverage to 400,000 villages - about 50 per cent of the rural population."

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