Tata Tele Integrates all Services Under DoCoMo Brand

OUR BUREAU NEW DELHI

Tata Teleservices on Wednesday said it had integrated all its service offerings under a single brand - Tata DoCoMo. This brand had so far been used only for its GSM-based mobile services.
India’s sixth-largest mobile phone company by customers currently provides services under several different brands — its CDMA-based mobile offerings are under ‘Indicom’, fixed lines under ‘Walky’ and highspeed data services under the ‘Photon’ brand.
“All Indicom customers will now be under the DoCoMo brand. The integration extends beyond the brand – there will be one website and one call centre for customer services,” its executive vice-president, mobility business, Deepak Gulati said.
He added that the company was going in for a technology agnostic structure to leverage emerging market opportunities by merging its CDMA, GSM, 3G and Photon platforms under one brand – DoCoMo.
Tata Teleservices is 26% owned by Japanese cellular company NTT DoCoMo.
The new brand unveiling also witnessed the company launching a Facebook phone for Rs 2,000. Gulati said collapsing all existing brands into DoCoMo would result in significant savings for the company, including that of marketing costs. For instance, its 3,000 plus-strong CDMA retail networks will now be accessible for GSM as well, and vice versa, while the Tata Photon dongle will now be sold across all its outlets.
“Overall, whatever savings we get on marketing will go back into customer generation, into demand generation,” he said.
According to him, the new branding would also help the company prop up its CDMA services. Asked specifically on the company’s CDMA base stagnating over the past couple of months, Gulati said that Tata Teleservices was making investments in this technology platform and unveiling a slew of new handsets for its customers in this segment to propel growth.
The company also unveiled Photon Max, the latest addition to its Photon family of high-speed data cards. This dongle works on the REV B technology platform, provides wireless broadband speeds up to 14.7 Mbps on the CDMA platform and will be available in five metropolitan cites — Mumbai, Kolkata, Delhi, Hyderabad and Chennai. It will be extended to another 22 cities by the year-end, Gulati said.