Tata Sky touches one million subscribers, targets 8 million by 2012

[BGonaSTICK]

Tata Sky Ltd, the joint venture direct-to-home company between Tata Group and Star, is targeting eight million subscribers by 2012.

Tata Sky has already touched one million subscribers in its first year of operations and is now going to lay emphasis on adding more value-added services.

The company is going to invest Rs 20 billion as it plans to ramp up its DTH subscribers over the next 5-7 years. Tata Sky has already pumped in Rs 10 billion.

The company would not lower price even in the face of stiff competition coming in the shape of Bharti, Reliance and Sun getting into the DTH sector, and said the upcoming rivals could go for price slashing only at the cost of quality.

Tata Sky MD and CEO Vikram Kaushik said, "Rival companies would perhaps not look at price slashing to get penetration. But even if it did, Tata Sky would maintain its quality of service and product at whatever cost."

Claiming that this was the fastest first million reached by any DTH platform in the world, Kaushik believed the growth would have been even faster if the regulatory environment was more favourable.

He held that in an intensely competitive market, there was need for only minimal regulation, and sought the government's intervention to reduce what he called a punitive tax of around 30 per cent on both channels and equipment.

Kaushik said that one of the key 'pulls' to be introduced is regional, segmented programming. Tata Sky, incidentally, does not have the Sun channels.

The other demand that Kaushik raised, in the absence of which much of its projected growth target could go awry, is 'partially exclusive content' for specialised groups of subscribers, which the government does not allow at the moment.

Tata Sky is operating through 245 exclusive distributors and about 30,000 dealers across the country. Kaushik did not expect the number of distributors to go up more than 300 in the medium term.

The plague of Tata Sky, especially on MDU (multiple-dwelling units) when heavy rain disrupts signals, is being looked at and will be minimised within the next four weeks.

"Today, we are giving 99.7 per cent clear signals, which means there is a problem with 0.3 per cent. But even that would be dealt with and solved within the next four weeks," Kaushik assured.

According to the AC Nielsen survey report, Tata Sky has scored 88 on the eQ Index of customer satisfaction and loyalty.

In this proprietary evaluation system of Nielsen, anything upwards of 85 is considered very good. Even in the other industries such as consumer durables, the highest score was 86.

Nielsen's survey showed the Commitment Share of Tata Sky (which means committed customers who are extremely satisfied and promote the product) was 88 and the Vulnerability Share of highly dissatisfied customers (likely to go away) was a 'manageable and not to bad' 3 marks on the same scale.

Source: IndianTV