Indian affiliates of Hong Kong's Hutchison Whampoa Ltd claimed a world first on Tuesday as they launched a service in which mobile phones are automatically updated with text news headlines.
The system offers to strengthen revenues for the companies, since it will encourage users to call up news stories and other information from menus that will be loaded on their phones already.
Hutchison, whose affiliates operate in four Indian cities and three states under the Orange or Hutch brands, said it had an exclusive head-start period for the use of the "cellular broadcast" technology licensed from privately held Israeli firm Celltick. The length of the exclusivity period was not disclosed.
"It is a global first. Hutch is the first service provider to offer the Celltick technology," Anuradha Narasimhan, head of marketing at Hutch's southern Indian unit, told a news conference in Bangalore.
"Orange Israel would perhaps be the next," she told Reuters.
The Indian mobile phone market is growing rapidly, thanks partly to a price war. Government officials expect the number of users to more than double to 25 million by the end of 2003 from about 10 million at the beginning of the year.
But the intensity of competition has given the operators an incentive to find new ways of keeping customers and getting them to pay for services. They see news and information as one answer.
In Hutchison's service, the phones will carry only the menus, such as a list of headlines. Users will pay for
selecting related information, such as the story behind the headline, which will be sent by the network.
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