A report from Boston Analytics has painted a rosy picture of the Indian mobile content market… “India has 100 million cell phone subscribers plus a growth rate pegged at 50 percent a year, and a highly favorable regulatory climate that makes the country potentially a huge market for mobile content” reports InfoWorld, in an article which takes the report just a little bit futher than it should [at this point I’ll note that other reports put the number of Indian subscribers much higher, eg 150 million at the end of 2006]. The arguments for attempting to enter the Indian mobile content market are strong; reasonably easy entry, the commoditization of mobile phones, a growing middle class and so on—but the article mentions a few challenges (although omits the fact that the average revenue per user is very low even amongst India’s burgeoning middle class). There needs to be stronger IP protection in India to improve the chances of making a profit, the network technology isn’t as advanced as other places, and it’s important to be local (20 regional dialects and five sets of languages). Still, there’s a lot of scope for services, for example the mobile phone networks reach places in rural India that the banks haven’t yet.