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.
The numerous integration measures have led to savings in areas including supply chain, technology, inventory management, and marketing.
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.
We are adapting to the situation by innovating new delivery modelss, launching brand campaigns that are impactful in the current context and closely monitoring changes in consumer buying behaviour, he said.
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.
While HUL's Fair & Lovely was launched in 1975, Emami's Fair & Handsome was unveiled in 2005. Both companies now straddle both the men's and women's fairness categories in the country.
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.
In the first two months of the current fiscal, Indian exports of finished steel reportedly grew by almost 76 per cent on a YoY basis and China alone accounted for close to 60 per cent of the increase.
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.
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.
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.
'Why should the state and Centre fight?'
In the domestic segment, demand is currently led by rural markets, oil and gas, LPG and B2C segments like roofing and sheeting.
For states like West Bengal, Bihar, Odisha, Jharkhand and Uttar Pradesh, where migration is high, the return of workers could be as much an opportunity as a liability. All states have launched portals to register migrant workers; additional fields like nature of employment and remuneration in the past 2-3 years are being added to help in skill mapping.
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