The Unisimka startup of VK Deputy Vice President for Strategy and Business Development Anna Kashnitskaya invested about 5 million rubles in the creation and release of a module for upgrading Android phones to a version with eSIM and started selling it. Kashnitskaya herself told this to RB.RU.
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“Investments in the launch phase of the project amounted to about 5 million rubles. The bulk of the funds were invested in the development of equipment and the purchase of basic SIM cards. We tentatively expect the investment to pay off within a year,” said the founder of the startup Anna Kashnitskaya. The entrepreneur assured that the expectations of payback are still preliminary and added that we are talking about family investments.
The Unisimka module allows you to download up to 15 electronic SIM cards to any modern Android phone with OS 9 or higher and then manage them using the application.
The target audience of Unisimka in Russia is users with the above-described smartphones without eSIM support, which accounts for about 50% of the entire subscriber base in the country. The device will be in demand among travelers and drivers who actively move around the country, the startup believes.
The Unisimka module can be inserted into the SIM card slot, then the application can be downloaded and finally a phone compatible with electronic SIM cards can be obtained. Previously, the eSIM connection option was only available for new and expensive mobile phones, the company explained.
Residents of Russia have connected 1 million eSIMs from July 2022 to July 2023. Since 2019, operators have attracted about 3 million virtual subscribers. According to the analytical agency TCA, there are about 390 million eSIM users in the world, the startup said.
eSIM is a new SIM card standard that allows users to connect to a mobile network without the need for a physical SIM card. Instead, the connection information is stored directly in the device’s memory.
Unisimka is a manufacturer of equipment to upgrade your phone to an eSIM-compatible version. Using the module and the application, users can manage one or more electronic SIM cards through the application, switching between operators or tariffs without changing the physical SIM card.
Author:
Ekaterina Strukova
Source: RB
I am a professional journalist and content creator with extensive experience writing for news websites. I currently work as an author at Gadget Onus, where I specialize in covering hot news topics. My written pieces have been published on some of the biggest media outlets around the world, including The Guardian and BBC News.
