Vodafone India aims to double revenue from enterprise segment in 4 years

NEW DELHI: Vodafone Business Service (VBS), the enterprise business unit of Vodafone India, is aiming to double its enterprise revenues in the next four years, as it expands its reach in the country and focuses on roping in more Small Medium Enterprises (SME) and government clients.

“We have doubled our revenues in the past four years and is looking to further double revenues in coming four years,” Naveen Chopra, director, Vodafone Business Services told ET.

The unit recently opened its third customer experience center in Gurgaon, which would help VBS to focus on government and corporate clients. Besides Gurgaon, the unit has customer experience centers in Mumbai and Pune.

VBS currently ranks No. 4 in the enterprise business revenue, after Bharti Airtel, state-run Bharat Sanchar Nigam Ltd. and Reliance Communications. Earlier, Chopra said that Vodafone hopes to become No. 3 in the enterprise segment by 2015. The company is the second largest telecom operator in India.

VBS operates across all 22 circles and is focused on four segments - Vodafone Global Enterprise (VGE), local corporates, small- and medium businesses and the government sector. The unit presently has 1500 global enterprise customers, over 5,000 large corporate customers and 200,000 SMB customers.

Chopra said that division is targeting the top one million SMEs out of some four million SMEs present in the country. “For the SME segment, we are working through our 125 channel partners in the country”.

He added that the unit is also focusing on the government segment through the new customer experience center in Gurgaon. The unit is working with DISCOM, NDPL and has deployed 40,000 SIM-based smart electricity meters. It has also done a similar deployment in Gujarat as well.

VBS also sees huge scope in the country’s Machine-to-Machine (M2M) space, which is still in nascent stages.

It is working with automobile company Mahindra & Mahindra for their electricity car Reva. VBS though is focussing mainly on the tracking and security segments.

Chopra said that 4G technology would be an interesting proposition for VBS in future. The Indian unit of UK’s Vodafone Group Plc. had bought spectrum in the February auctions which would allow it to offer 4G services in five telecom circles in the country.

Vodafone has 135,000 km of optic fiber and has more than 120,000 base stations (BTS) across the country.

It has constantly been upgrading its network to better serve its enterprise users in the country across all the verticals.