The trigger: Like many Indian cities, Pune is bursting at its seams. A boom in IT and services has increased incomes, fuelling a real estate boom that is adding 27 million square foot of space every year. With new automobile units coming up around Pune, the city is exploding and traffic is at its worst.
Indiabulls Wholesale Services, the retail arm of Indiabulls Real Estate, has acquired Piramyd Retail, a company owned by the Ashok Piramal Group which runs 35 neighbourhood retail stores and seven lifestyle stores. Indiabulls Wholesale has acquired 63.92 per cent stake in Piramyd Retail at an enterprise value of around Rs 208 crore (Rs 2.08 billion), said sources close to the deal.
In a move that will result in further snowballing of the spectrum issue, British telecom major Vodafone has termed the Reliance Communications' (RCom) allegations "as false and inconsistent with the facts".
The move by three major telecom service providers - Bharti Airtel, Vodafone Essar and Idea Cellular - to set up a consortium for passive infrastructure is gaining ground, but independent telecom infrastructure providers are yet to be convinced.
The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India has authorised service providers to either penalise errant telemarketers with a fine of Rs 500 per unsolicited call or disconnect their lines following subscriber complaints.
Reliance Communications chairman Anil Ambani has proposed that the government should make it mandatory for telecom service providers to surrender additional spectrum that they are not utilising. Putting his proposal into practice, Ambani has also conveyed his willingness to surrender the extra 1.8 MHz spectrum that his group has in the Bihar circle.
Upping the ante in the ongoing spectrum war, Reliance Communications chairman Anil Ambani has shot off a missive to the Department of Telecommunications (DoT), accusing GSM operators of having cornered spectrum under the valuable 900 MHz.
After consumer finance and real estate, the Indiabulls Group is set to step into the retail business. Indiabulls Wholesale Services Ltd, a subsidiary of listed firm Indiabulls Real Estate Ltd, will set up 30 hypermarkets across as many smaller cities in the country in the next 15 to 18 months with an outlay of Rs 1,500 crore (Rs 15 billion).
Chennai-based Indowind Energy is in advanced stages of negotiations to acquire a wind energy company in Europe for an estimated price of around $100 million (Rs 400 crore). The acquisition, if successful, will help the wind energy and farming company to expand its footprint both in domestic and global markets.
Vodafone-Essar, the leading GSM operator is raising around $500 million (Rs 2,000 crore) through overseas borrowing. This is the first fund raising by the telecom major after British telecom major Vodafone acquired a majority stake.
The entertainment industry is not amused by her activities, neither is the IT sector since it has given rise to a new breed of e-criminals (piracy is a crime according to the Indian Cyber Act 2000). Moreover, system administrators abhor her existence since her downloading clogs their corporate networks, weakens their firewalls besides disseminating unregulated content.
The UK retailer earned an EBITDA of 2.7 million in the year ended June 2007 on the back of 17 per cent growth in sales, said Welspun India director Akhil Jindal in Mumbai on Monday. Christy's, which was losing money, customers and market share when it was acquired by Welspun, has reversed the tide by winning back customers, adding new ones and expanding its reach by opening more shop-in-shops.
In August this year, ABN Amro Bank decided to renew the lease for its 3,100 sq ft office space at Nariman Point's Sakhar Bhavan, but the landlord dropped a bomshell by jacking up the rental to Rs 500 per sq ft.
The spectrum tangle has also resulted in the fall of telecom share prices as investor confidence was eroded after the Department of Telecommunications (DoT) decided to permit CDMA (Code division multiple access) players operate GSM (Global System for Mobile communications) services in their existing circles.
Poor broadband penetration, high priced set-top boxes and last-mile (to the home) connectivity problems are delaying the telecom industry's much-touted plan of rolling out Internet Protocol Television (IPTV) services.
The company recently received permission to launch GSM services within its existing license and is awaiting allocation of spectrum, the radio frequency that enables wireless communications, from the government. CDMA and GSM services cannot be operated on the same spectrum.
Though in its infancy in India, mobile advertising is emerging as the biggest competitor to Internet advertising. It might even cannibalise online advertising, states a new study by global analysis firm Thomas Weisel International. India's online advertising is expected to reach an inflection point by 2009-end - a time when mobile advertising is predicted to grow at a scorching pace.
Telecom subscribers in the country can now make intra-state call at the rate of a local call, with the state-owned telecom company Bharat Sanchar Nigam (BSNL) extending its group-dialing facility to private operators. Group dialing facility enables local dialing within a state by pre-fixing `95' to the receiver's number.
Wannabe telecom operators will take a while to know whether they have passed the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India's test. But that hasn't stopped them from taking the next step: tying up with infrastructure providers such as tower operators for rolling out their nation-wide operations.
Call blocking is one facility that telecom service providers claim is only for the chosen few, for instance the celebrities. Not withstanding its niche appeal, service providers in the country are in various stages of implementing the technology.
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