espire feb 2010_vol 1_issue 2

8/14/2019 ESpire Feb 2010_Vol 1_Issue 2

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repreneurEntrepreneurship

Symbiosis Institute of Telecom Management

Volume 1 Issue 2 February 2010


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E-Cell Objectives:

Manifesting the latent entrepreneurial spirit of the youth. The cell aims to bring out the entrepreneurial spirit in budding managers and provide

them with the vital support system to set up new ventures. The prime focus of E cell is to develop a sustainable and encouraging platform that

supports people across the globe in starting up; thereby realizing their ideas andconverting them to reality.

E-Cell Vision:

To establish ourselves as a complete Incubation Centre providing support acrossall facets of entrepreneurship and throughout all stages of entrepreneurial ventures.

E-Cell Mission:

To foster and sustain the spirit of Entrepreneurship amongst students across theemerging entrepreneurs and provide them with a platform to convert their ideas tobusinesses. We aim to foster the Spirit of Entrepreneurship amongst the masses atlarge.

About E-Spire:

It is a monthly E-magazine by E-Cell of Symbiosis Institute of Telecom Management,Pune. The vision with which E-Spire is launched is to Inspire the students who

Aspire to become successful entrepreneurs.

Disclaimer:

In no event shall Symbiosis Institute of Telecom Management, Pune; hereafterreferred to as SITM, be liable for any indirect, punitive, incidental, special orconsequential damages arising out of or in any way with any content (or any materialprovided here under) whether biased or on contract, tort, strict liability or otherwiseeven if SITM has been advised of the possibility of the damages.


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Contents

Entrepreneur of the Month

04

Mobile Application: The Revenue Generator05

How Far Can You Go?07

B-Plan of The Month: StudentSahayta.com09

Entrepreneurs in Indian Telecom1 1

Think Space | Case Study13

Entrepreneur Speaks |14

All Are Invited!15


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Entrepreneur of TheMonth Sunil Bharti Mittal runs India's largest GSM-based mobile phone service . Sunil is an alumnus

of Harvard Business School and graduated fromPunjab University. He started his first businessas seller of cycle parts, with borrowed capital of Rs. 20,000 in 1970 . By 1982, Mittal had started abusiness selling portable generators importedfrom Japan and that gave him the chance toinvolve himself in activities like marketing andadvertising; soon, the government banned theimport of generators as two Indian companieswere awarded licenses to manufacturegenerators locally. Instead of taking it as asetback, he took it as an opportunity andfounded Bharti Telecom Limited (BTL) withtechnical tie up with Siemens AG of Germany formanufacturing of electronic pushbutton phones. By the early 1990s,Mittal was making fax machines,cordless phones and other telecomgears.

He is the person who takes initiativeand uses the opportunity to optimal level. Hewas the first mover in telecommunication sectorin India. In 1995, Bharti Cellular Limited (BCL)was formed to offer cellular services under thebrand name AirTel. Within a few years Bhartibecame the first telecom company to cross the2-million mobile subscriber mark. The companyis also instrumental in bringing down the high

STD/ISD, cellular rates in the country by rollingthe countries first private national as well asinternational long-distance service under thebrand name IndiaOne.

Mittal is a competent negotiator and thisquality helped him in expanding his business.Now Bharti enterprises have tied-up with AXAgroup of France to form Bharti AXA group, joined with Del Monte to form Bharti DelMonte. It has formed another joint- venture

with Wal-Mart to form Bharti Retail. It also hastie-ups with Vodafone, Warburg Pincus, andBritish Telecom. Sunil Mittal is good atcalculated risk taking.

He developed an innovative business model inwhich outsourcing and collaboration was givenmore importance and chose IBM as itsoutsourcing partner while Nokia and Ericsson tobe its network partners. He also made anundersea cable link project connecting Chennaiand Singapore with entering into a joint venturewith Singapore Telecom International. In thisway Bharti group was able to provide cellularservices for its customers at lower rates. Mittalalso launched the Bharti Airtel's Digital TVpartnering with Infosys Technologies to deliverNext-Gen interactivity on its DTH service.

Mittal is a Global leader - this can beseen in his bold move to have a dealwith South-African telecom giantMTN, and even though the MTN dealwas unsuccessful, this has notstopped Bharti who is now in a

process of striking a deal with Kuwaitbased Zain Telecom.

The complete journey of Sunil Bharti Mittal is aninspiration and motivation for all the youngaspiring entrepreneurs, the message is thatthere is no right time to do anything, you justhave to act quickly to grab the opportunity andalways be ready to take the calculated risk.Doesnt matter if your business is small, what

matters is that you started.

Written By | Siddhant Jain | Student, SITM


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Mobile Application:The Revenue Generator Mobile Applications: Overview

Mobile apps have brought the world to yourfingertips and promise a revolution incommunication. Nokia's Ovi Store, AndroidMarket, Blackberry App World, Apple's AppStore and upcoming versions from Samsung andMicrosoft give thousands of independentdevelopers a relatively quick and easy route toconsumers fingertips. With the currentexplosion of new applications, it is expectedthat the market for mobile applications will be"as big as the internet", peaking at 10 million

apps in 2020. The excitement around mobileapplications is going to have a major impact onour economy, and our way of life.Convergence and integration are the newmantras in the field of mobile technology. Withtechnologies pacing towards them, soon youwill find all the applications converging into asingle multi purpose device whereby yourmobile phones can be used to check currentstock prices or even be connected to a remotely

placed system.Mobile Application For Health Care:

Several rural regions around the world,especially in under-developed areas, donot have access to basic healthcareservices and much of the burden of healthcare delivery falls on local healthworkers who have limited skills andexpertise.Cell phones are increasingly being usedas common clients for a wide suite of distributed, database-centric healthcareapplications in developing regions. Thisis particularly true for rural developingregions where the bulk of thehealthcare is handled by health workersdue to lack of doctors.Unfortunately, the current distributedsystems is far too heavy-weight formobile these applications, particularly inlight of the high communications cost.

So innovative solutions can beintroduced catering to the needs of thehealth sector. One of the innovativemobile applications can be Effici entLightweight Mobile Records (ELMR) system.This is one of the innovative productwhich has been implemented in Africancountries , which meets the urgentdemands of health sector in the ruralareas.

What Is ELMR? Why ELMR?

It is a lightweight mobile record system.It can enable health workers andpatients in rural areas to fetch andupdate their patient records and alsoallow doctors to remotely track thehealth record information of patients . Existing mobile Telemedicine efforts likeOpen Rosa, Open MRS and many healthcentres have made significantcontribution in healthcare mobileapplications but these applications areyet not feasible to be implemented inmany developing nations . Reasonsbehind these are:

1. Firstly the above existing applicationsrely on high end smart phones or PDAswhich cannot be affordable by thehealth workers and patients.

2. Secondly these applications rely mostlyon a standard database and GPRSconnectivity which is economicallyviable only in urban settings.

3. Thirdly, existing implementations maybe heavyweight for low-end cell phones.

To address the above limitations ELMRcan be used.

Mobile Application For Education:

Mobile technology is strategic to manyorganizations and activities. Education is noexception! The use of mobile technology hasnot only extended desktop-based onlinelearning environment into the mobile andwireless channel but also enabled education totake place anytime, anywhere. The use of


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mobile technology in education is also known asmobile education or m -education. Some of the applications that can be introducedin the education sector are:

A rural private schools network can beimplemented through which interactivelearning and exams can be conductedfor the rural children. SMS based examscan be conducted for standardisedevaluation of school children on basiclanguage and mathematics skills.Mobile phone Vocational training canbe provided.A Knowledge bank service can be aneffective medium of mobile learning forpeople in rural areas. Here thesubscriber has to call a specific numberand he can receive detail learning onthe subject area of his interest. Thisservice can be regional specific.

Other Applications:

An effective mobile application for RuralEnergy Network: In rural energy retailwork several viable distributionchannels are identified for energyefficient products (ex: stoves) in remoterural villages. So an application can begenerated using mobile technologythrough which agents can be used forinventory management, maintainingtransaction details and customerfeedback. A drinking water organisation in aregion can monitor day to dayoperations at the plat level through anSMS based application. This mobilefeature will record day-to-dayproduction and sales data as well asrevenue generated per day. Mobile application to spread awarenessin interior areas in times of emergencylike natural disasters ( ex: cyclone).

Challenges In Implementation Of MobileApplications:

Focus only on youth and entertainment:Usage of VAS, specially in India has not spreadevenly across demographic profile of customers.

Currently the youth segment is driving the VASmarket as can be seen from the rapid growth of Entertainment VAS (mass service) and not sorapid growth of mCommerce and Infotainment.

Piracy of Content:Another reasons for players playing safe and notinvesting in novel applications and content isbecause this market is greatly affected by piracyThis is acting as a barrier for companiesinvesting into content development.

Preference For Low Feature Handsets:Though the mobile subscriber base is growing, alarge chunk of the market is opting for basic lowfeature handsets in spite of the fact thathandset prices are coming down. There is amindset to purchase the handset for basic utilityservice which is voice. But these handsets arenot in a position to support a large number of VAS.

Transparency In Revenue Sharing:

Transparency is a big issue faced by the entitiesin the Mobile VAS value chain. The market ishighly unregulated and there is no transparencyin terms of contact payouts and royalties.

Written By | Manisha Panda | Student, SITM


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How Far Can You Go? There goes a saying, Your horizon stretchesonly as far as you can see. This seems to bevery true of any entrepreneurial venture. What

we dream can always be carved into reality, butit is the extent to which you allow yourself todream that decides the level of your success.

But it would be foolhardy to assume that anyventure, when aimed high, will always besuccessful. Every idea has to be followed by amethodical layout of the business plan, andbacked by sufficient financial mileage. Besides,proper infrastructure and effective manpower

are vital ingredients for a success recipe. Oncethese essentials are taken care of, it is solely upto the man in the forefront to decide which pathhis venture will take to build a plain and solidbase which allows him to bank on his expertise,or to scale vertical limits by expansion anddiversification.

Mind you, both the paths are equally effective,and although a horizontal path does not offer

you as much exposure as the vertical one, it isequally profitable when it comes to financialgains. But the similarities end here. Any kind of expansion requires a certain vision of the futureand a clear understanding of ones strengthsand weaknesses; and ofcourse, the ability totake risk. As T.S. Eliot once said, Only thosewho will risk going too far can possibly find outhow far one can go.

Today, one can talk about several entrepreneurswho made it big in their own fields by wideningtheir horizons early on. And it is only throughreal-life examples does one get inspired to scalenew heights. Let us look at few such examplesto take cue from their success paths.

Sam Walton the retailing Czar

Sam Walton's career in retail began in 1940when he became a sales trainee in Des Moines,Iowa at a J.C. Penney store. His desire to make

his customers happy was so great that he oftenlet other responsibilities like paperwork andkeeping the books fall by the wayside. Waltonkept his job, however, because of his ability as agreat salesman.

In 1942, Walton was drafted into the UnitedStates army. He worked in the communicationsdivision of the Army Intelligence Corps andremained on home soil throughout the SecondWorld War. When he left the army three yearslater, Walton was married, had a child, anddecided to start his own business to support hisnew family. With the $5,000 that he had savedalong with a $20,000 loan from his wife's father,he purchased a Ben Franklin variety store inNewport, Arkansas. Walton was 27 years old.

Determined as ever to succeed in his venture,Walton looked for other rural Arkansas townsfor a new place to set up shop. He came acrossa small village called Bentonville and opened theWalton's Five and Dime in 1950.

Walton's revolutionary plan was to have largesuperstores in rural towns that discounted a

wide variety of products. His initial approachwas to Ben Franklin. They turned him down asthey did not like the idea of operating withlower margins. Without a large company behindhim, Walton opted to go it alone. In 1962, hemortgaged his home and borrowed againsteverything he owned to open his first Wal-Martin Rogers, Arkansas, a neighboring town of Bentonville.

Excited about the prospects of getting discountsand selection that were previously onlyobtainable in the cities, rural customers cameout in droves to his store. The success of his firststore allowed him to expand and by 1969 hehad 18 Wal- Marts in Arkansas and Missouri.Funded solely through debt and reinvestedprofits, Walton decided that in 1970 he wouldtake the company public. The IPO raised $5million and Walton retained 61 percent of thecompany. The money was used to settle the


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company's debts and fuel further expansion. By1980, 276 Wal- Marts were operating.

Michael Dell living his childhood dream

Michael Dell became an entrepreneur at a veryyoung age of 12, made his first $1,000 by sellingstamps, and later sold newspaper subscriptionsfor Houston Post, making enough money to buya BMW at 16. This young and ambitious boy hadhis plans well on track by 19.

Michael Saul Dell was born on February 23,1965 in Houston. His father was an orthodontistand mother, a money manager. Dell wasinterested in computers from a very young age.He joined the University of Texas but later gaveup studies to pursue his entrepreneurial dream.

In 1984, with $1,000 in his pocket, he gaveshape to his dream venture. From his room inthe university, Dell started working on hisbusiness plan. His idea was to assemblecomputers according to customers preferencesand sell them directly. He named the start-up,PC's Limited. Dell's approach was unique. He

was the first to introduce the direct salesmethod in the IT industry. The direct salesclicked and there was huge demand forcomputers. Dell knew that he could beatcomputer dealers by selling at lower prices withgood technical service. Most of his orders wereplaced through friends who spread the wordaround. He moved to a small office and hired afew people to take orders and upgrademachines. Avoiding a third party to sell

computers turned out to be profitable and thecompany grew at a seriously fast clip.

In May 1983, Dell incorporated the company asDell Computer Corporation. In 1985, Dell startedto design and make computers withcomponents sourced from outside. His focus,right from the beginning, was on customers andgood service. By 1992, Dell ComputerCorporation entered the Fortune 500 list of the

largest companies in the world. At the age of 27,

Michael Dell had become the youngest CEO of aFortune 500 company.

Dhirubhai Ambani from rags to riches

Dhirubhai Ambani was born on 28 Dec. 1932 asthe third son to a school teacher in Gujarat withmoderate means. Ambani moved to Aden,Yemen when he was 16 for a livelihood. Hestarted his career as a dispatch clerk beforebecoming the distributor for Shell Products. Hewas later promoted as a manager in an oil fillingstation at the port of Aden.

Dhirubhai returned to India after 10 years andfounded Reliance Commercial Company with acapital of Rs.15000 in Masjid Bunder in Mumbaiwith a business mission of importing polyesteryarn and exporting spices. He went on toestablish Reliance Textiles in 1964 under thebrand name Vimal, and the World Bankapplauded the brand as the best PolyesterCloth. Perceiving success, Dhirubhai establishedReliance Industries Ltd in the 1970s, and therest, as they say, is history.

Aspirations know no bounds

The three men mentioned above bring to mindonly one word vision. Take the example of anyother entrepreneur in the world, whether it isHenry Ford or Jamshedji Tata, Rupert Murdochor Oprah Winfrey, Anita Roddick or RichardBranson; all these who made it big eitherdreamt about it early in their lives, or rode theirwave of success to farther shores. Theres

nothing wrong in dreaming big, and if you havethe intellectual, financial and the businessacumen, theres no stopping you from realizingthose dreams.

Written By | Aditya Chavan | Student, SITM


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B-Plan of The Month:StudentSahayta.com Concept:A major chunk of the population in Puneconsists of students and young single workingprofessionals, owing to the fact that Pune has alarge number of Engineering, Medical and MBAinstitutes and also, it is an industrial hub. Mostof these students and professionals are non-residents of Pune, who have come to this cityfrom far flung places. Hence, the first thing theywant to know about the city is where to stay?How can they get a flat or a room on rent at a

place close to their college or office and that tooat the lowest price possible? This is where wecome in. We will help these people get a placeto stay, as per their convenience and budget.

Product:StudentSayahta.com is web portal that gives theexact details about the places put up on rent ina particular locality in a city (currently Pune). Italso gives other necessary details to help

students settle down in the city easily likeWhere to buy the furniture & otherhome accessoriesLocation of the nearest restaurantsLocation of the nearby mess/Tiffinfacilities, etcMessenger dedicated for same collegestudents.

Apart from giving these basic details, we willalso provide other details to the target segment,like:

Part time job in nearby locations.Nearby mallsTourist locationsRecreation centersClubsShopping

Students from their native places.

These will form the value added services for thecustomer, our core service beingaccommodation and food. The website will alsohave information like movie reviews, ongoingsales/offers, events, contests, adventure trips,forums, etc.

Location covered: Initially we will cover only Pune. After that wewill extend to other similar locations

Target Market Segment:As mentioned earlier, the target segment is thestudent community, coming to Pune from othercities for education. Also, the young singleprofessionals, who have come to Pune to workand do not have family here.Target Market Study:

Only 38% of the people living in Pune areresidents of Pune. Out of the non-residents, weexpect the majority to be students and workingprofessionals only. There are approximately 29different types of institutes in Pune likeEngineering, Arts, MBA, Commerce, etc. Also,the number of institutes is around 240. Punehas the largest number of software companiesin India, 212, followed by Bangalore. Hence,there is a huge segment that we can cater tothrough our website.

Competitors:The major competitors are:

Property dealers, providing rentingfacilities in the concerned city.Other web portals providinginformation about the city in general.

Differentiating Factor:We would be providing entire informationrequired by students in one web portal (Roomavailability, Mess/ Tiffin facility/ Information onPart time jobs in nearest locality etc. ) Propertydealers charge a lot of money from the students& also from landlords. Hence, we provide acheaper option for the customer & landlords.Also, all the other web portals provide general


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information about the city, but none providesabout accommodation. Hence this will be ourUSP. Also, our website will give much localizedcontent to suit the needs of the targetcustomer.

STARTUP STAGE:

Infrastructure:Since this is only a web portal, we will not behiring any office space for the same. Hence, nofixed infrastructure will be required initially andit will be a work from home kind of a business.

Costs Incurred:Cost of buying web space: 100 MB space- Rs.3000/ AnnumCost of designing the website: Rs.40, 000

This includes content, database and the annualfee of buying a domain name (Rs.1000-Rs.2000).The updating of the website will be a regularprocess which will be done by. Domainregistration also requires approximately Rs.1000, which has been included in the above.Total cost Rs. 2, 000/ year. We will tie up withsoftware professional for updating andmaintaining the site regularly- Cost Rs.30, 000/annum

2 Computers = Rs. 60, 000

Internet connection + Electricity charges = Rs50,000/ annum

Hence total initial cost= 175000 + marketing

expenses (100000) + Miscellaneous ( 25,000)= 3,00,000

Financing:

Initially, We will not be taking money frommarket , we six persons would contribute50,000 each.

Marketing of the Product:The website will be marketed through

Social networking websitesBlogs

Tags on WebPagesViral marketing through YouTubeBulk SMS through websites likewww.160by2.com

Expected Revenues:

The revenues will majorly be generated fromadvertisements on our website & commissioncharges from Landlords. We will be signing upwith affiliate networks for invitingadvertisement and our websites. Modelpreferred would be Cost per ThousandImpressions, however Pay per Click Modelwould also be used for some products. Forexample, In the Cost per Thousand Impressionsmodel, we will get approximately Rs. 2000 for20,000 impressions of one product or service onour website.

EARLY GROWTH STAGE:Early growth rate would be slower becausevolumes of business & advertisement revenuewould be lower. We will reinvest the earningsfrom initial stage to the business. We would bespending more on our marketing in early growth

stages. We will make more tie-ups with builders& landlords for more number of availablerooms.

LATER GROWTH STAGE:Later on, we plan to extend the portal for othercities where we can find a similar targetsegment like Noida, Bangalore, and Hyderabadetc. We also plan to construct hostels of ourown to provide accommodation in the Pune

city.

Concept By:

Meenal Gandhi

Amandeep Sandhu

Samit Kharpudikar

Nawa Issouph

Saurabh Prasad

Tanvi Rastogi (Students, SITM)


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Entrepreneursin Indian Telecom

What does it take for a person to become anentrepreneur? A certain set of skills, knowledgeyes, true to some extent but most importantlyhe needs to have a vision and an indefinitepassion to put that vision into action. The skills,knowledge shall come along!

Telecom industry is booming which is evidentfrom current scenario where new technologiesare under implementation; new players areentering the market, teledensity reaching47.89%. It was effort of many to bring thisindustry at such progressive state and one suchspecial personality, an entrepreneur in thisregard cant be forgotten. It was thevision of this technocrat which firedthe telecom revolution. Friends, thisspecial personality is Sam Pitroda whoinvented the concept of P.C.0 theyellow public phone booths which

have now spread all across India.

He was propelled by his vision and

strived to bring it into action.

The following excerpt of his interview

highlights how he started off -

I want to go fix Indias telephones. It sounded

romantic. So then I decided to go back and forth

every 2 weeks just to learn about India and finally someone said Hey you need to meet

Mrs. Gandhi if you really want to do something

on that scale. I didnt know how to meet Mrs.

Gandhi, I had no connections, I didnt know

anybody in Delhi. Finally through somebody, this

man was a member of parliament from Gujarat,

who knew my father in law, Mr. Baria, a very

nice gentleman. He saw spark in my eye and he

said I will organise a meeting for you. Heorganised a meeting and it was initially going to

be a 10 minute meeting and I decided to cancel

it. I said look in 10 minutes you cant do

anything. This is really serious, she should give

me an hour and everybody sai d Are you crazy?

Why would Mrs. Gandhi give you an hour?

I said look we cannot do much in 10 minutes. So

I waited. Finally got a call after 8-9 months that

she would give me an hour. I went back from

Chicago with a presentation and all that. She

had her entire cabinet there, everybody finance

Minister Pranab Mukherjee, Venkatraman they

were all there at that time. That is when I got to

meet Rajiv (Gandhi) for the first time. After that

meeting there was no stopping for Sam Pitroda.

In 1984 Centre for Development of Telematics

(CDOT) was founded under his

leadership.

C-DOT is the Telecom Technologydevelopment centre of the

Government of India and established

as an autonomous body. It was vested

with full authority and total flexibilityto develop state-of-the-art

telecommunication technology to

meet the needs of the Indian

telecommunication network. At C-DOT, Sam

Pitroda and his team created coin dropping

PCOs which generated instant bill at users end.

Also as the head of the Telecom Commission he

installed one rural telephone exchange in the

country every day further the number of exchanges scaled up to 25 on a daily basis. This

installation helped 600,000 Indian villages to be

connected by telephone. Going through his

work its remarkable to see how he worked with

innovation and speed for development of

society.

There are more than 50 patents held by SamPitroda. He has been awarded thePadma Bhushan award in 2009 by the


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Government of India for his contribution toScience and Engineering. He also received theRajiv Gandhi "Global Indian" award in 2009.

Like Sam Pitroda many entrepreneurs have

travelled the journey of transforming theirvision into reality. Here are few examples fromthe industry where this journey continues.

Lt.Col.(Retd).H.S.Bedi of Tulip telecom (aleading MPLS/VPN provider in India) is one suchexample of an entrepreneur .He put his thoughtof entrepreneurship into action after servingarmy for 22 years .This thought had developedby interaction with lot of businesses during histenure as an instructor in computer wing atMilitary College of Telecom and Engineering.

Tulip initially a software company is now aleading MPLS/VPN provider in India . Lt Col H SBedi was amongst the 18 finalist for the Ernst &Young Entrepreneur of the Year Award, 2009.

VNL provider of WorldGSM isgood example of howinnovation is brought outthrough entrepreneurialactivity. This start-up throughtheir business model of microtelecom has provided

opportunity for local entrepreneurs in villages.WorldGSM is the first fully-fledged mobileinfrastructure thats completely independent of the power grid.

Another example is of Uday Mehrotra, recipientof Young Innovative Telecom EntrepreneurAward at the National Telecom Awards2009.He founded Ubico network in 2007.TodayUbico is leading neutral-host infrastructureprovider of in-building wireless infrastructure.

Entrepreneurs in telecom have not only broughtout innovative business models with variedtechnological implementation but also haveprovided our country with an edge in this arena.

(References: News articles, websites, VNLmicrotelecom white paper, c-dot official website, tulip telecom official website, blogs)

Written By | Dipali T Lavangare| Student, SITM


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Think Space | Case Study Aspire is a company specializing in developingContent Management Infrastructure and

applications for Mobile Operators. Theirclients include large multinationals in Asia,Africa, Latin America and Europe. Aspire isbased in Singapore and Sydney, Australia.Aspire creates value for network operators,content providers, application partners andindividuals through the provision of enablingtechnologies at the convergence pointbetween content, applications, networkinfrastructure and multi channel accessdevices. Aspire is focused toward enablingenhanced services for our customers,accomplished through a balanced approach of innovative product development andintegration services.The company is very strong and has multiplecustomers in India, Bangladesh, Indonesia,Vietnam and the Philippines. They haveoffices in New Delhi, Ho Chi Minh, Jakarta,Manila, Beijing, Dubai and also in San Paulo inSouth America. They have gone from no staff to about 120 employees over the last nineyears. The company is privately held and hasno outside funding, so there are no VCs andno significant debts of any kind. It has fundedits growth out of cash flow and the organisersof the company do not wish to offload thestake even going forward.Aspire is involved in three lines of business atthe moment. They are one of the pioneers inhandset-based electronic pre-paid top up, sothey have established this business in manycountries where airtime top up dealers sellairtime using USSD or SMS interfaces off theirhandsets. They have some very largeinstallations in Guam with about 4 million topups a day, Indonesia and Pakistan are veryclose to those numbers.They have also pioneered person-to-personcash transfers, and they are now doing about$100 million of throughput every month, witharound a million transactions a day and 3million active users who are doing

transactions from remittances to selling eBaypurchases in Guam. They have mobile moneysolutions in Guam, Kuwait, Madagascar,Pakistan, Bangladesh, Indonesia and India.

Since the company has offices across manydifferent locations there are multipledepartments being based out of these offices.With the growth of the company and its staff,similar job profiles are being handled byindividuals based out of different offices.However, the salaries offered to peopleacross the offices have been different. Mr.Zubin, HR lost many potentially resourcefulemployees while negotiating theremuneration structure based ongeographical differences. Problem becomesmore acute because unlike multinationals,different offices do not have separateremuneration policies and the policies arecentrally governed. Different salaries offeredto staff performing similar functions basedout of different offices might pose a challengeof dissatisfaction in staff.

Questions:Question1: Elaborate on the problemstatement and suggest the bestapproach to provide the solution forthe problem statement.Question2: Identify the parametersbased on which the currentremuneration policy of the companyis based? Justify with logical analysisQuestion3: How do you ensure andbring parity in the salary of employeesdoing same kind of role, depending onthe geographic differences, cost of living in these geographies and stillmaintaining retaining the faith of people in the HR policies?Question4: For the given problemprovides the best solution that thecompany can employ in this scenarioto increase the companys employeesatisfaction index?

Source | Events Committee, SITM


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Entrepreneur Speaks |

(Source: The National Entrepreneurship Network ( NEN ), India)

Instructions to play the video clip:

Click on above highlighted area A dialog box will open, select Play the multimedia content and Click on Play


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All Are Invited!

Team E-Spire invites contribution from corporate and B Schools all across India. We are looking for

original articles related to entrepreneurship.Also Contribution can be in the form of:

Puzzles, jokes and cartoons related to entrepreneurship.pictorial representation of an Entrepreneur's journeyInterview with the Business ManArticles related to businessAnd finally anything form business perspective that you feel will be helpful

References should be cited wherever necessary.

The Best contribution will be recognized as Best Contribution of the Month in the next issue.

Instructions:

Please send your articles along with your formal passport size photo before 10th March2010 to [email protected].

Do mention your name, institute name and batch with your article. Format: Font:- Times New Roman, Size:- 12, Length

espire feb 2010_vol 1_issue 2

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