Vodafone, India and McKinsey

There is much excitement in the general media about Vodafone's apparently successful $11.1 billion acquisition of a controlling stake in Hutchison Essar, one of India's leading mobile operators. I was this time interested by the usual PR puffery statements from Vodafone senior execs:

The PR people has Chief executive Arun Sarin saying that the announcement was "clear evidence of how we are executing our strategy of developing our presence in emerging markets".

Meanwhile, chairman, Sir John Bond (formerly of this Parish, where he ran HSBC), described India as "destined to become one of the largest and most important mobile markets in the world," predicting that the deal would see Vodafone "playing [its] part in delivering the significant economic and social benefits which mobile telephony can bring to the people of India".

I mention this because over the weekend I was reading this interesting piece from McKinsey about the use of mobile telecommunications in emerging markets like China, India and the Philippines. It suggests that "the economic impact of all wireless activity on these countries is up to four times the value to the wireless operators alone. Much of this value appears to come from the productivity gains and economic surplus that wireless customers receive simply by using their mobile phones".

About 3 weeks ago, we were posting on the mobile content boom in India and how this might just be more important than broadband for media companies in the next few years.