As the new owner, Airtel will take over Telenor India's spectrum, licences and operations, including its employees and customer base of 44 million.
Airtel DTH has high hopes from a market that offers scope for exponential growth but is already packed tight like a can of sardines. Can the telecom major pull it off?
Equity investors suffered a massive loss of Rs 31 lakh crore on Tuesday as markets went into a tailspin with the BSE Sensex tumbling nearly 6 per cent as vote counting trends showed the BJP may not have a clear majority in the Lok Sabha polls. Erasing the record-rally of the previous trade, the 30-share BSE Sensex cracked 4,389.73 points or 5.74 per cent to settle at 72,079.05. During the day, the benchmark tanked 6,234.35 points or 8.15 per cent to hit a nearly five-month low of 70,234.43.
Consolidated net debt of Airtel increased by 24 per cent to Rs 97,395.2 crore.
Revenues of Airtel and Idea have been hit by falling realisation and analysts said margins would be affected by higher costs.
It also asked why the data shared pertained to a period from April 2019 even though the scheme for anonymous political funding was introduced in 2017.
Is the Airtel Zero plan really a big blow for net neutrality? Will it end the 'free' internet as we know it? Amidst the hullaballoo over the issue, Sudhir Bisht provides a contrarian view.
Among the Sensex constituents, as many as 16 stocks closed with losses with Nestle India, Kotak Mahindra Bank, IndusInd Bank, Bajaj Finserve, Titan and JSW Steel being the major laggards. Index major Reliance, Hindustan Unilever, Maruti and Tata Steel also declined due to selling pressure. In contrast, NTPC, TCS, Tech Mahindra, Bajaj Finance bucked the trend and ended the day in green. Axis Bank, Bharti Airtel, Mahindra & Mahindra and Tata Motors also defied the trend.
The next spectrum auction will be held in late February 2024 and the reserve price for most bands will remain the same as the 2022 auction, department of telecommunications (DoT) officials have said. The government expects operators to go for low bands beginning in 600 megahertz (MHz), licences for many of which are lapsing soon. Back in September 2021, the government had decided that spectrum auctions should be held annually.
From the Sensex basket, Asian Paints, Sun Pharma, HDFC Bank, Tata Consultancy Services, Axis Bank, Tata Steel, JSW Steel, Larsen & Toubro, ICICI Bank and Power Grid were the major gainers. Tata Motors dropped over 8 per cent despite reporting over three-fold jump in consolidated net profit at Rs 17,528.59 crore for the fourth quarter ended March 31, 2024. NTPC, Bharti Airtel, Titan, State Bank of India and Nestle were the other major laggards.
Most public sector banks, flush with deposits now, offer 3-4% interest on savings deposits, while a few private sector banks go up to 6%.
Airtel users can subscribe to Airtel Talkies at Rs 30 per month for four movies with 30 days validity, or Rs 10 per week for one movie with seven days' validity.
Singapore Telecommunications (SingTel) has increased its stake in Bharti Airtel, India's largest mobile service provider, to 32.15 per cent from 32.04 per cent.
Debt-saddled telecom operator Vodafone Idea Ltd's Rs 18,000 crore follow-on offering (FPO) opened to a modest response on Thursday with just 26 per cent of shares on offer being sought by investors. Of the 1,260 crore shares on offer, 331.24 crore was subscribed on Thursday, according to information on the BSE. Qualified institutional buyers picked up 61 per cent of their 360 crore shares reserved for them while non-institutional investors sought 28 per cent out of 270 crore shares earmarked for them.
With intense competition in telecom sector, the two companies are rushing to diversify into other revenue streams, prominent among which are cloud services.
Connecting Maharashtra, Goa and Mumbai telecom circles without roaming charges, Airtel on Wednesday announced a 'One Maharashtra' scheme for its pre-paid and post paid customers in these circles.
Airtel on Wednesday said its customers can enjoy free unlimited incoming calls on international roaming while travelling to popular destinations like the US, Canada, the UK and Singapore.
Telecom operator Bharti Airtel on Monday said that its subscribers can access social networking site Facebook on their mobiles free of cost for two months till August 31.
Payments banks are expecting to get the rights to offer small-ticket loans sometime soon, according to an industry source familiar with the matter. The industry has been in talks with the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) for some time in seeking lending rights.
RBI's exercise will take into account standards of governance, the viability of the payment bank (PB) business model, and changes, if any, if needed.
From steel tycoon Lakshmi Mittal to billionaire Sunil Bharti Mittal's Airtel, Anil Agarwal's Vedanta, ITC, Mahindra and Mahindra, and a lesser-known Future Gaming and Hotel Services were among the prominent buyers of the now-scrapped electoral bonds for making political donations.
Telecom major Bharti Airtel on Monday unveiled its wholesale service portfolio that will enable telecom operators across 50 countries access its services. Bharti Airtel's wholesale portfolio will offer MPLS, ethernet, IP and International Private Leased Circuit (IPLC) services to global carriers through its global network with a reach to 50 countries, Bharti Airtel said in a statement.
While Airtel may be pushed to to No 3, Jio will find it mighty difficult to beat the new entity.
To launch a service that will enable users to use Google services for free on their phones.
Dixon Technologies' January-March quarter (Q4) results came in well below expectations, but the potential for signing up a new mobile client, and plans for backward integration into display manufacturing kept investors happy. Dixon's Q4FY24 revenue grew 52 per cent year-on-year (Y-o-Y) to Rs 4,660 crore, below Street consensus, due to weakness in consumer electronics (Rs 890 crore) and home appliances (Rs 294 crore) segments.
During a recent pilot test with 15,000 Airtel subscribers in Delhi and the NCR region, Affle claims to have boosted Airtel's average revenue per user by almost 8 per cent.
Bharti Airtel recently acquired a 100 per cent stake in Wireless Business Services, a company founded by US chipmaker Qualcomm. Subsequent to the acquisition, the company was renamed Airtel Broadband Services.
Company has already reached out to its customers and employees
The deal between Bharti group and Tata Teleservices is yet another example of how swiftly things can change in business.
Billionaire Mukesh Ambani-promoted Reliance Industries Ltd (RIL) on Tuesday became the first listed company to hit the Rs 20 lakh crore market valuation mark. The market heavyweight's stock jumped 1.88 per cent to its record high of Rs 2,957.80 apiece on the BSE. It finally settled at Rs 2,928.95 per piece, up 0.90 per cent on the bourse.
The telco, being one of the first operators in the circle, has a strong base of high-value subscribers; Airtel could leverage that for its top-end services.
The recognition that content - video in particular - will be the next big thing in the telecom wars requires no rocket science.
Trai has said the three operators were "intentionally denying and delaying" the provision of points of interconnects (PoIs) to Jio, "only to restrict a new entrant thus violating the terms and conditions of licence and regulations of the Authority which also caused a lot of inconvenience to the consumers."
President, Telemedia Services, Bharti Airtel, Atul Bindal, said unlike DTH, IPTV services would be available only in few major cities. The company had recently introduced DTH service in the country.
Targetting Non Resident Indians in the United States, Bharti Airtel on Thursday launched its 'CallHome' service at the price of 7.9 cents per minute.
In FY23, Indian operations accounted for 41.6 per cent of the consolidated revenue of India's top five multinationals, up from 34 per cent in FY18 and 33.2 per cent and 34.2 per cent in FY21.
AirTel on Thursday announced a tariff plan for new subscribers in which the user has to pay a net monthly charge of Rs 299 and rupee one per minute for cell-to-cell local calls.
Numbers could be classified further into (140) marketing and (160 or 161) for service calls to easily identify the purpose of the call in the future.
All the three companies, which dominate India's mobile services market with about 53 per cent share, have reduced the quantum of Internet download and/or validity periods on various packages they were offering, as per their websites.
With this acquisition, Airtel will be second company, after Reliance Jio, in the country to have pan-India presence in 2300 Mhz band
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