A New Chapter of Digital Transformation Telkomsel, Enter the Realm of Edtech and Healthtech

On Friday, June 18 2021, PT Telekomunikasi Selular (Telkomsel) officially replaced the old 26-year-old logo with a new identity. President Director Telkomsel Hendri Mulya Syam said, this step became the next round to continue The roadmap comprehensive digital transformation.

“It became a symbol of change where Telkomsel wants to strengthen its vision and mission to the community by maximizing opportunities in all aspects of life. We are committed to continuing the transformation so that Telkomsel can be the first choice in meeting their digital lifestyle needs,” said Hendri in his official statement.

According to Hendri, his party will develop many breakthroughs and cross-industry collaborations. One of them is strengthening joint strategic partnership Gojek with a focus on developing the industry mobile gaming. Interestingly, in this new chapter, Telkomsel also introduced the Kuncie application-based solution as one of the latest breakthroughs.

Kuncie is a platform EdTech which provides business development learning services in various categories with experienced mentors. edtech is a business vertical which may have never been a diversification of the telecommunication operator's line of business, whether developed independently or through investment schemes or strategic partnerships.

Telecommunications operators generally develop digital solutions that are still relevant to their main business. For example, IoT, big data, and entertainment (music, video, games). What is the big hypothesis Telkomsel into this new category?

Kuncie and Fita

Recent years, Telkomsel expanding the scope of its digital solutions through its internal incubation and acceleration division Telkomsel Innovation Center (TINC) and Telkomsel Innovation Partners (TMI) as an investment extension company outside the corporate ecosystem. This is a strategic step to find the right business model for its telecommunications business.

As is known, the journey of the telecommunications industry in developing digital solutions from the start has not always been smooth. One of the challenges is that telecommunications do not have the expertise to develop reliable digital solutions product-market fit. It's also difficult to commit to long-term investments to develop a viable business sustainable.

According to the information compiled DailySocial from internal sources, development of digital solutions Telkomsel focuses on two major hypotheses. First, the hypothesis "inside out", Telkomsel potentially release (spin-off) this solution is to increase its valuation if it is successful in the market.

Take, for example, the Tcash digital wallet which was released and renamed LinkAja in 2020. This hypothesis can apply to the platform key and Tape which is a platform EdTech and healthtech. Second, the hypothesisoutside-out"focusing on finding ideas or use case which is closely related to business unit Telkomsel. For example, B2B collaboration.

Furthermore, Telkomsel judge that EdTech and healthtech has great potential to grow in the future. If referring to the e-Conomy SEA 2020 report by Google, Temasek and Bain & Company, EdTech and healthtech contributed significantly during the Covid-19 pandemic.

The report also mentions, for services Telemedicine alone, its use quadrupled during the pandemic. Meanwhile, the number of app installs EdTech tripled in the January-August 2020 period compared to the same period in the previous year.

The company has conducted market analysis on these two verticals by looking at investment trends, markets, and global and local needs. Telkomsel find that the need street learning or non-formal education in Indonesia is still high. It becomes starting points Kuncie by considering a number of aspects, such as marketsize, players and problems that exist in the market. If Kuncie gets a positive response in the market, it is possible that Kuncie's service coverage will be expanded.

Likewise Fita, Telkomsel also found that most of the sub-vertical healthtech which are quite widely adopted in Indonesia are services that are post-treatment, like medical. However, not many platforms yet healthtech who entered the service pre-treatment, such as service wellness.

Indeed, there are several wellness platforms from abroad that users use. However, the content is not localized according to the needs of the Indonesian market. Telkomsel also revealed, sub-vertical services such as Fita have reached 70% product-market fit in the global market. On the contrary, in Indonesia as much as 70% actually comes from medical services.

business model

Kuncie allows its users to upskill and re-skill through learning content and conducting sessions mentoring based on demand through the application. Meanwhile, Fita offers a number of more personalized health services, such as exercise programs and healthy food recipes. Both are available for download on the Google Play Store and App Store.

DailySocial had time to try these two applications. For the Kuncie platform, the content available is quite a lot. The business people, content, and mentors presented are also diverse. Users can also create learning plans according to the desired topic.

To enjoy new content, users get reward three tokens per day. If you want to add tokens unlimited, users can join to become premium users. Users can also collect points from each content watched where these points can be used to buy tokens. Unfortunately, we haven't figured out how to become a premium member, nor the possibility to buy tokens with digital payment methods.

Meanwhile, we haven't been able to explore more on the Fita platform. What we can only enjoy are exercise programs, exercise tutorials, and healthy food recipe tutorials and tutorials.

Despite all that, Telkomsel has many resource to be able to explore Kuncie and Fita's business model. This also proves whether these two services can become successful pilot models outside of the business verticals that are usually handled by telecommunications.