India's telecom sector has been through dizzying peaks, troughs, policy U-turns, court battles, brutal competition, and daily controversies. India could go back to a private sector duopoly with just Reliance Jio and Bharti Airtel surviving the mayhem. The third player, Vodafone Idea, could be history.
Companies say that unlike in the US and other countries, in India the high cost of rentals and lower ticket price makes it unviable to run an operation without half the seats available for sale.
Chingari, Roposo, Khabri and Trell are seeing huge traction as people are looking at options to earn incentives from home. Music streaming app Gaana, which is strongly placed in the market with 150 million users, recently opened up its short video platform for subscribers.
Reliance is leveraging the technological change of building a virtualised 5G network which would see the current hardware-dependent networks shift to software-centric platforms.
Apart from digital advertising revenue, both companies want to reach out to the 'next billion' Indian customers. After all, around half of the 1.3 billion population is still not on the net and this represents a challenge as well as an opportunity.
According to software company Mavernir, the new virtualised networks would lead to a saving of 40 per cent in capex and 34 per cent in terms of lower operations cost for operators.
Beside RIL's Jio Switch and Jio Browser, smaller Indian app companies who have been overwhelmed by TikTok are again seeing a big rush - even though till the second week of June they might not have been even listed in the top 100 apps in the country.
The Indian authorities feared that these apps were transferring consumer data to locations outside the country, especially China, in an unauthorised and surreptitious manner. With servers in India, the data of local consumers would be stored in the country.
JioMeet, which has already got the endorsement of top government officials and politicians, saw a huge surge in its ranking on Google Play, based on its downloads.
The mobile phone manufacturers are planning to plead with the government that the new rules suggested by the DoT could leave them with no option but to stop introducing new phone models in the country if the stringent rules are eventually approved.
Globally, the focus has moved back to India, especially in terms of telecom assets. Vodafone Idea, with some 300 million customers, continues to be attractive with shares available at a low price.
Govt's e-commerce portal asks sellers to specify country origin of products. Now, the commerce & industry ministry has mandated that the Government e-Marketplace, which has seen Rs 55,048 crore worth of transactions till now, adopt this approach in the interest of creating an 'Aatmanirbhar Bharat'.
According to industry insiders, India has 400 million smartphones and is the world's fastest-growing app market. So the addition or deletion of apps impacts the global valuations of these platforms. "Based on calls given by various local organisations to delete Chinese Apps, there will be an impact," said Blaise Fernandes, director at foreign policy think tank Gateway House. "All of them eventually will go the IPO (initial public offering) route so there would be economic impact also."
Steel, cement, aluminum, fertilisers, tractors, two-wheelers, beverages and carbonated drinks, tyres and FMCG could see demand back to near normal levels by the third or the fourth quarter of the financial year, or even earlier.
After the first draft of the Bill was submitted under a committee chaired by Justice B N Srikrishna in 2018, there were objections raised by businesses, especially on the broad restrictions on cross-border data flow.
Phishing attacks could either be in the form of an email from a trusted source asking for personal information such as passwords, bank details and personal details, or it could mimic an existing website or webpage and trick a user into entering confidential information on the page.
Gulabo Sitabo was made with a budget of Rs 40 crore to Rs 45 crore. Amazon Prime bought the streaming rights for Rs 60 crore to Rs 65 crore, helping the producers make over Rs 20 crore.
Ebix had signed the agreement last year to acquire Gurugram-based Yatra Online for an enterprise value of $338 million (about Rs 2,327 crore) in an all-stock deal. The deal was supposed to conclude in the October-December quarter after regulatory approvals but went through several extensions, according to regulatory filings with the US Securities and Exchange Commission.
Mitron probably would have continued with the free run for quite some time, had it not come to light that the source code of the app was actually developed by a Pakistani developer, reports Neha Alawadhi.
Work is underway in identifying global companies in sectors ranging from electronics, auto components and medical equipment to shift part of their existing or incremental manufacturing to India.
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