In Russia, by the end of this year, customers of the Beeline mobile operator will be able to pay for purchases on Google Play using a mobile account.
This is reported by the newspaper “Kommersant” with reference to Mikhail Gerchuk, commercial director of the international holding Vimpelcom Ltd. For reference, this holding owns 100% of the Russian company VypelCom, which is well known in Russia under the Beeline brand.
According to the agreement with Google, a part of the amount spent by the user on an electronic purchase will be deducted in favor of Vimpelcom. However, it is not entirely clear whether this amount will come from the 30% received by Google, or above the base cost of the application.
Anyway, this decision seems very timely, given that, according to the same Kommersant, in Russia up to 80% of mobile payments are made for cash, and not using credit or debit cards.
In Vimpelcom, judging by Gerchuk’s words, they hope for an increase in the balance of users, which will increase significantly when money can be spent on mobile applications. As for Google, a similar experience with Vodafone, Telenor and T-Mobile allowed to increase the growth of application usage by 30%, as well as triple the downloads of paid applications.