Tata Teleservices Limited (BOM:532371) has announced that it will be unifying all its CDMA, GSM, and Photon consumers under the Tata Docomo brand, thereby killing its Tata Indicom brand.
Explaining the company’s new business approach to The Economic Times, Tata Teleservices regional head (South), Yatish Mehrotra said:
Our new business approach gives TTL new strategic direction in the ‘access, content and solutions’ spaces, enabling the company to offer compelling propositions to customers in a market that has been witnessing far-reaching changes in terms of usage trends and customer preferences.
Tata Teleservices stated that it will start migrating all the existing Tata Indicom customers, except those in the Delhi-NCR region, into Tata Docomo from tomorrow. Delhi-NCR users will be migrated to the Tata Docomo network at a later date.
The company also noted that this announcement will mark the entry of Tata Docomo into the CDMA business in India, where it is making significant investments to upgrade its network, in order to widen its existing footprint.
Born out of a joint venture between Tata Teleservices and the Japanese telecom giant NTT Docomo in November 2008, Tata Docomo started its operations in Tamil Nadu in November 2009. It currently operates in 18 of 22 telecom circles in India and is the fifth largest operator in the country, according to the recent TRAI numbers.
It was credited for disrupting the Indian telecom scene, by being the first telecom operator to introduce per second billing, which led to other telecom operators like Bharti Airtel, Vodafone and Idea following suit.
It was also the first private telecom operator to start 3G services in India in November 2010, after securing licenses in 9 of 22 circles for Rs 5864.29 crores ($1.19 billion). As of September 2011 (PDF), it had 88.3 million wireless subscribers (GSM+CDMA) and 1.33 million landline subscribers (see chart below).
On a side note, Tata Docomo enjoys a pretty active social media presence, with its Facebook page being one of the top three pages from India with 4 million fans, according to SocialBakers, and is the fastest growing Facebook page in India.
It was also the first major brand to use Twitter’s own advertising service to run ads on the popular microblogging platform.
[Source: Economic Times, Data from TRAI]
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