Comviva targets 10% of 5G-enabled business globally in next 5 years

Comviva, a subsidiary of Tech Mahindra and a global mobility solutions provider, is targeting a 10 per cent share of the $2-billion addressable 5G-enabled business applications market across the world over the next five years.

While the market across all segments is $20 billion, the company will begin with three verticals -- banking and financial services, manufacturing, and health care.

Elaborating on the 5G plan, Manoranjan Mohapatra, chief executive officer of Comviva, said: “It is a competitive market with global and local players. The market is large and did not exist earlier because these services were not possible on 4G. They require high speeds, huge amounts of bandwidth, low latency, and on-the-edge commuting (5G enables processing closer to the enterprise, which improves quality). Also the margins are good because the investment is not like that in telecom.”

Mohapatra said earlier the company provided enterprise solutions to telcos. Now it will offer applications and solutions directly to enterprises and they will be hosted on the public cloud.

However, it will partner telcos to get access to customers of the enterprise and their network in a revenue-share model.

Telcos cannot provide such solutions. For instance, a bank may have customers with mobile connections of four operators.

Comviva aggregates customers on behalf of the enterprise client and shares revenue with it.

“It’s a win-win for both. Telcos are themselves looking at increasing their enterprise revenues from 6-7 per cent to 40-50 per cent of the total in three to four years through 5G-enabled solutions,” added Mohapatra.

The solutions enterprises can offer customers are varied. For instance, a burger company can reach its customers by offering the menu through augmented or virtual reality.

Banks could provide analytics services to their clients or could ask Comviva to offer the digital KYC option to their customers.

Comviva and Tech Mahindra have been key proponents of building indigenous technology for 5G networks, a goal the government has also been pushing, especially in the case of 4G deployment for BSNL.

Mohapatra said: “We are at a stage when all are ancillary units building components. Someone is building a chip, someone a radio transmitter, and someone MIMO (multiple-input and multiple-output). But to put an end-to-end piece together, the ability from a scale point of view we do not have. We do not have large R&D houses that can do that.”

But Mohapatra said in two to five years there would be companies able to build complete end-to-end 5G systems in the country.

There are many building sub-systems by integrating some components, he said.