SUSHODH: Case Study

A company X is an established player in rural market offering mobile based

virtual services offering customized Agri advisory services across the country
where millions of subscribers are connected. The company managed to keep the
subscribers engaged and scale over a period of time with the growth in the
telecom market. Majority of the customer base happens to be small and marginal
farmers relying on the services as key source of information for farming and allied
practices.
The large chunk of the subscribers are non-smart phone users and as a result the
internet boom has not been able to make so much of a difference to the company’s
revenue stream.
The company is profitable as of now but the future growth prospects does not
look very attractive in the existing telecom market and thus is keen to invest and
diversify in other markets. The brand is backed by a strong rural super brand and
has many strengths including visibility in deep rural pockets, rural distribution
and network (created for telecom business), core agriculture backend team,
farmer base (over 2 million), 100 plus connected FPOs, decent technology
support team, etc.
As part of the diversification process, few of the verticals company recently
invested in are –
- Cattle feed: Made sense for the company as the likelihood of connected
farmers owing cattle is high thus was considered a low hanging fruit
- Agri-tech integrations: Company invested in pursuing advanced technology
to serve its huge farmer base
- Retail product: Company was seen largely as a farmer’s company, thus
wanted to leverage its brand name and launched its retail FMCG brand. Also,
it was an opportunity for the company to link the farmers connected through its
other services to forward link their produce
The challenge for the company is to scale each of the verticals, utilize the existing
bandwidth (largely telecom) in non-telecom products and setup the diversified
businesses as the mainstream revenue channels.
Realizing that the targeted clientele for each of the vertical is different and that
the businesses are fundamentally different to each other, the company is setting up
the right processes for each business but with strong focus on digitalizing the
processes. The management strongly believes that the disruption in every market
segment is soon to happen with the increasing digitization and data- driven
business operations. Also, the increasing digital and internet penetration in the
rural segment may disrupt many traditional players who may lose it market share
owing to old practices.
Each of the verticals have started off well but the company knows scaling up and
eating market share of established players in each segment is going to be difficult.
As part of its next 5 to 10 years roadmap, the company wants to be among the
market leaders in all the segments it is investing in and thus is looking for
innovative ways of sales and marketing, e-business, e-distribution stacks to
increase productivity of the channel, innovate in product, subscriber base.