Brazil, Russia, India and China represent the most dynamic, emerging markets in the world. From 1996 to 2006, the combined GDP of the four countries, called the BRIC economies, rose to more than $17.8 trillion from roughly $7.5 trillion. Telecommunications played a crucial role in their economic development. In particular, the mobile telecommunications industry of these four countries is experiencing very fast market growth combined with rapid technological change and fierce competition. Therefore, telecommunications organizations have no alternative but to improve their productivity and efficiency in order to become more competitive and profitable. A wide variety of empirical studies on productivity and efficiency in the telecommunications industry is available, but few studies have measured and compared operational efficiency among mobile operators. To my best knowledge, this study is the first attempt to measure and compare the operational efficiency of the ten dominant mobile operators in BRICs, including Vivo, TIM, Claro and Oi in Brazil, MTS and Beeline in Russia, Bharti Airtel and Vodafone Essar (previously Hutchison Essar) in India, and China Mobile and China Unicom in China. The study period is between 2002 and 2006.
In this study, partial factor productivity (PFP) is first measured by means of three indicators ─ revenue per employee (RPE), revenue per total asset (RPA) and revenue per capital expenditure (RPC). Next, the overall technical efficiency, pure technical efficiency and scale efficiency of mobile operators are measured by the data envelopment analysis (DEA) approach. The number of employees, total assets and capital expenditures are used in the DEA model as input variables. As for output variables, this paper chooses total revenue. Finally, sensitivity analysis is conducted in order to determine the degree of sensitiveness to data variations in the application of DEA
This study has some interesting findings; in particular, partial factor productivity demonstrates that three of the four Brazilian mobile operators, Vivo, TIM and Oi showed remarkable productivity ratios and the state-owned operator China Unicom had the highest RPC among BRICs. In contrast, Indian mobile operator’s productivity ratios were generally low compared to other BRICs mobile carriers. Consistent with the findings of PFP, the results of empirically implementing DEA approach indicate that the two dominant Brazilian mobile operators, Vivo and TIM, were fully efficient throughout the entire period of study. The fourth largest Brazilian mobile operator, Oi, and the second dominant Chinese carrier, China Unicom showed remarkable improvement and achieved fully efficiency in the later period of study. Overall, Indian mobile operators were the least efficient among BRICs operators in the period of study. Interestingly, the findings of this study verified that full operational efficiency can be achieved by operators with large revenues, such as China Unicom, as well as by others with medium and small revenues, such as Vivo, TIM and Oi. Finally, the results of sensitivity analysis suggested that the input variable that seemed to affect the efficiency score the most was total assets.

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