‘Enterprise will be a big growth driver for Vodafone’

While everyone knows Vodafone India’s consumer mobile services, the lesser-known enterprise business segment is also quietly adding to the company’s growth. It contributed nearly 12 per cent to Vodafone India’s total revenue of ₹37,606 crore last financial year and is growing at twice the rate of the consumer business. In an interview with BusinessLine , Naveen Chopra, Director, Vodafone Business Services, shares details about the company’s plans for the unit. Edited excerpts:

How strong is your enterprise business and what are the plans for this segment?

The enterprise business for India is still a relatively young part of the organisation. It took us a few years to articulate what exactly our play would be and how we would go forward as a large strong enterprise business.

A lot of deliberation went into that roadmap. And we have been executing the plan for the last four-and-a-half years.

Now, we have all the necessary capabilities to manage the environment in terms of the applications and services management space.

How are your fixed-line services performing?

We have expanded the fixed-line services in the last two-and-a-half years — in terms of connecting large offices and wider connectivity for the banking sector as banks look to fulfil their banking requirements, including going into rural areas.

We also work with large companies — the hunger for digital communication is growing exponentially. Over a period of time, we will look at the cloud and data-server space. We see ourselves as being a total end-to-end communications provider and are executing that from the product perspective.

Would you consider making the fixed-line service a separate business unit, like Airtel has done?

No. Our philosophy is a little different. We believe our business is segmented to the customer, rather than looking at the product. I have one account manager for a customer, who builds the relationship and understands the customer’s needs.

He/ she thus becomes an expert — so we maintain the relationship at one person so that the customer knows whom to call in Vodafone. It is just like how personal banking works — there is one person for each service, such as investment or insurance or fixed deposit; our relationship manager is like that. Therefore, I see no reason to separate it and it’s doing exceedingly well.

What kind of opportunities do you see from SMEs and the Government?

There are millions of SMEs. So, we have set up a separate team to look after SMEs — it has different challenges. We believe that 80 per cent of SMEs that we would want to talk to, out of one million, operate out of 350 cities.

We need channel partners and, very importantly, a different way to service them because selling is the easier part, servicing is different.

That is why we are right now busy building the entire channel partners’ framework.

As for the Government business, we see it moving from e-governance to m-governance — with much of the Government’s schemes moving to mobile phones. The conversations are already on.

What kind of revenues do you expect from the enterprise business?

We can’t share absolute numbers, but we see enterprise revenue doing almost twice the volume of our consumer business, in terms of growth. The enterprise business is relatively still a smaller part of our (overall) business.

But, for Vodafone, it will be a big growth driver for the next few years as enterprise is a strong part of the business units. We see the enterprise business growing by 2X for at least the next four-five years as compared with our consumer business.

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