Vodafone Idea is planning to do something different from its competitors. The third-largest telecom operator in the country believes more in a partnership model when it comes to offering more products/services to the existing customer base. Because the telco has more than 200 million customers, even businesses don’t mind partnering up with Vi. The company’s CEO, Ravinder Takkar, said (as per Business Standard) that Vi is looking to take its core competence and existing customers and tie-up with the top two-to-three players in each category and do deep integration with them to offer their customers something different than their competitors.
Vodafone Idea Doesn’t Have the Money or Resources Even to do What Airtel and Jio are Doing
Both Bharti Airtel and Reliance Jio are rolling out their own platforms for the users instead of partnering up with others. This is because the top two telcos had money in the first place to invest in building other products. Vi can’t afford this. The telco would rather spend the money that would be required to develop new products on expanding 4G networks across the nation. Over the last year, Vi has formed multiple partnerships. The telco now offers gaming services, job services, ad-tech services, and more. Most of these services/products have been launched in collaboration with others. Thus, Vi gets to attract new users while these platforms get to leverage Vi’s extensive customer base. Jio and Airtel don’t need to partner with anyone as they already have so many of their own products. Airtel owns a music platform, and so does Jio. Both the companies have their own video streaming platforms as well. Vi is just playing catch up with its competitors but is trying to do it in a different manner to give users a unique experience. These partnerships are focused on increasing revenues for Vi since its mobile business is not performing the best at the moment.
