With the spectrum auction now delayed till at least next May, the expected 5G orders for telecom equipment have not been sealed, the companies point out. Surajeet Das Gupta reports.
Of the amount, the home-grown private equity player founded by Renuka Ramnath plans to deploy $8 billion in various companies as part of its blueprint for growth.
Mobile device maker Realme has overtaken South Korean giant Samsung to grab the second spot in the branded smartphone market, with 18 per cent volume share in October this year, revealed Counterpoint Research. Its rival Samsung ended October with 16 per cent share. Xiaomi (including its brand POCO) was at 20 per cent; Vivo at 13 per cent. The ascent brings Realme closer to its ambition to reach the No. 1 berth by 2022 when it hopes to sell over 40 million smartphones annually.
'Should we shortchange our investors by exiting early?'
The government is engaged in talks with telecom firms for a launch of commercial 5G services in some cities by Independence Day and has assured them that spectrum auction will take place in April-May, providing them a three to four-month window for the rollout. A top executive of a leading telecom gear company said the deadline was feasible in some cases. "It can be achieved in some cities as it will take us 4-6 weeks to deploy a network, once the equipment or components have reached India.
Buoyed by Sooryavanshi's success, the Hindi film industry is banking on 25-30 big movies lined up with a collective cost tag of Rs 2,000 crore.
Ola Electric is moving the delivery for the first batch of its electric scooters to between December 15 to the end of the month, a two- to four-week delay from its earlier schedule, due to a shortage of chipsets and electronic parts. The first batch of deliveries were scheduled for November 30 but the company decided to delay them after a meeting between its factory team and the global supply chain on Saturday. It became clear that the late delivery of chips and electronic parts was only 'getting worse', sources told Business Standard. Ola has apologised to customers for the delay and said it is "ramping up production as fast as we can so that you can get your Ola S1 at the earliest". It has stopped taking any new bookings until the chip shortage has eased, say sources.
As many as 2,000 chips are annually designed in India by semi-conductor and fabless companies, Intel India managing director Prakash Mallya said in a conversation with Business Standard. Mallya was reiterating the importance of India in the semi-conductor sweepstakes. "As much as 90 per cent of the semi-conductor companies have a design footprint in India.
Leading microchip providers Qualcomm and Intel say the chip shortage might last anything between four months to a year, perhaps even two years, depending on the various product categories - mobile devices, ICE, electric vehicles, appliances, data centres. Prakash Mallya, MD, Intel India and vice president, sales and marketing and communications group, said the spike in demand was huge, and cut across segments from PCs, phones, appliances and auto leading to the shortage.
Social e-commerce platform Meesho is set to disrupt the food and grocery market by offering free home delivery on all orders in over 200 below Tier 1 cities in a year's time, in the first phase. It is also disrupting the monetization model by focusing primarily on advertising revenues rather than commissions from sellers, as distinct from its competitors. The move is expected to challenge the big players in the sector which include Jio Mart, Tata's Big Basket, Amazon, Grofers, and others, many of which have minimum prices for free delivery.
Indian Space Association (ISpA) chairman Jayant Patil has said that the executive council will debate whether it can include more telecom companies as founding members. The response came after some leading telcos said that they had been asked to be core members but preferred to be inducted as founding members. The key founders of the ISpA include the Bharti group through two companies (OneWeb and Airtel), L&T, Nelco, Walchandnagar, Alpha Designs and MapmyIndia.
Tata Group, which will now include Air India, Vistara, and Air Asia, has the highest market share of departures on the top 10 routes in the country. According to the data from Caladrius Aero Consulting, which tracked the departure data for eight airlines in August and September, Tata Group is ahead on all the top 10 routes ranked in accordance with the number of departures in August-September 2021. On the top 100 routes in terms of departures, Tata Group is ahead of its chief rival IndiGo on 30 of them.
Mutliplexes want the gap between a film's release in theatres and on OTT to be doubled from 4 to 8 weeks.
In what is amongst the first focused fund in the space, India Media Entertainment Fund (IMEF) is raising Rs 500 crore, which will provide both equity as well as instruments like non-convertible debentures (NCD) to companies in the content, distribution platform and services areas. The private equity fund has appointed a high-profile advisory body which includes ad guru Prahlad Kakkar, managing director of Red Chillies Entertainment and cricket team KKR Sports, actress and entrepreneur Raadhika Sarathkumar, who has starred in Malayalam, Hindi and Kannada films and runs Radaan Mediaworks. It also includes Ramnath Pradeep, former chairman and managing director of Corporation Bank, and Rajesh Gupta, senior partner of law firm SNG Partners.
'The opening up of theatres is well-timed to coincide with the festival season and give a big push. We expect box office collections to reach 2019 levels when they stood at Rs 10,000 crore.' Surajeet Das Gupta reports.
Vodafone plc has made it clear that it will not make any fresh equity infusion in its Indian telecom business--Vodafone Idea Ltd (VIL). Responding to a query, a spokesperson at the UK-headquartered telco said: "Just to confirm our position, there will be no new equity infusion from Vodafone Group." This is the first time that Vodafone has spoken about its stand after the government announced a telecom package.
'There is no doubt at all that Jio's disruption of the mobile broadband market was a turning point for India's digital economy.'
Eighteen months after the government started banning Chinese mobile apps, two distinct changes have occurred in the country's mobile app sweepstakes. The move has given a thrust to domestic app publishers, especially in certain segments and it has dramatically reduced the market share of Chinese apps. What started as an interim government ban on 59 Chinese apps, including the highly popular TikTok and WeChat in March 2020 ended as a permanent ban on many of them in January this year. According to a China Internet Report 2021 (by South China Morning Post), the market share of Chinese apps in India has dropped substantially from 44 per cent in 2018 to only 29 per cent in 2020. In 2017 it was 41 per cent.
From powering mobile devices, US chip designer Qualcomm has tied up with Ola Electric to power its electric scooters. Qualcomm is providing the key 4G connected octa core android platform which provides connectivity, computing capabilities and enables rich immersive displays with power saving software.
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