Prime Minister Narendra Modi will launch the much-awaited 5G services in India on October 1, 2022, an official release said on Friday. According to the release, 5G to be launched by the Prime Minister in select cities, will progressively cover the entire country over the next couple of years. The cumulative economic impact of 5G on India is estimated to reach $450 billion by 2035. Capable of supporting ultra-high-speed internet services, the fifth generation or 5G is expected to unleash new economic opportunities and societal benefits, serving as a transformational force for Indian society.
Nearly half of the investments by various US-based investors have been made in Reliance subsidiary Jio.
Google on Wednesday launched its global 'Be Internet Awesome' programme for children in India in partnership with Indian comic book publisher Amar Chitra Katha to interweave critical internet safety lessons across eight Indian languages. The tech giant has also launched an enhanced Google Safety Centre in eight Indic languages as part of its efforts to step up safety of users on the internet. Google has significantly increased its resources dedicated to India's Trust Safety teams, including product policy analysts, security specialists, and user trust experts that support over 10 vernacular Indian languages, enabling its central teams to benefit from the local nuance and inputs.
The highest number of requests are in Karnataka (39.18 million) and Tamil Nadu (35.56 million).
At the annual general meeting of Reliance Industries earlier this week, Isha Ambani, director at Reliance Retail Ventures, announced that the company is foraying into the fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG) space. But analysts say that only time will tell if this will lead to a disruption in India's FMCG market. While Reliance Retail's initial strategy is to take its own brands, which it currently sells at its own supermarkets and hypermarkets, to general trade, it is also looking at acquisitions.
The COVID-19 pandemic and the ensuing lockdown may have put the best of funds on a backfoot of deal activity, RIL, however, has been an outlier. With 10 different investors brought in for its telecom venture Jio Platforms, RIL undertook 12 different transactions since April this year.
The three companies for sale are Reliance Communications, Reliance Telecom and Reliance Infratel.
Reliance has significant investments in telecom, consumer retail and media businesses in India.
Telecom operator Bharti Airtel will start rolling out 5G services this month and cover all towns and key rural areas of the country by March 2024, a senior company official said on Tuesday. Bharti Airtel managing director and CEO Gopal Vittal also said that the price of mobile services in India is very low and needs to go up. "We intend to launch 5G starting August and extend to a Pan India roll out very soon.
Bharti Airtel's fund raising is expected to strengthen its competitive positioning in the market and provide the telco with the necessary ammunition for aggressive 5G rollout, analysts said. The capital raising announcement, though unexpected and surprising, would enable Airtel to enhance its market share and provides it wherewithal to make faster investment in a scenario India moves to a two-player market earlier than expected, some analysts felt. Bharti Airtel's board on Sunday approved raising up to Rs 21,000 crore by way of rights issue at a price of Rs 535 per share.
Top companies have grabbed a bigger pie of their sectors in the pandemic period, leading to a further rise in market concentration in many industries as measured by the Herfindahl-Hirschman Index (HHI). The HHI score, which indicates competitive intensity in an industry (or a lack of it), reached a new high in FY21 as bigger firms raised their revenue market shares either organically or through mergers and acquisitions. A higher HHI score indicates a rise in market concentration in favour of a few firms while a lower score means that the industry's revenue is more evenly divided among many companies
Providing services like broadband connectivity, cable TV, enterprise solutions, and payment wallets is the need of the hour for telcos, and a second wave of consolidation is upon the industry, a rating agency said on Tuesday. India Ratings and Research said the sector, which was battered following the aggressive entry of Reliance Jio, will continue showing signs of recovery amid conducive regulatory environment and maintained a "stable" outlook for the industry in FY22. The second round of consolidation (Consolidation 2.0) is kicking-in in the industry, which will bring a transformation in the business models of telecom companies, leading to the evolution of incumbents from the providers of traditional voice-only services to complete digital solutions for households, it said.
It emerges that Vi has probably offered good data quality despite being short on spectrum and infrastructure due to its stretched finances. Did the two companies that merged face the heat due to price wars? Probably. Did the government's tough stance in demanding its "due" share of telecom revenues hurt the company? Certainly!
Udaan - India's largest business-to-business (B2B) e-commerce company - has laid off about 180 employees, or 4-5 per cent of its workforce of 4,000, in a move to drive cost efficiency, revealed sources. They said the layoffs have happened across various department functions. The layoffs have happened at a time when the Bengaluru-based firm is trying to turn into a publicly listed entity in 18-24 months.
According to telcos and analysts, this is due to SIM consolidation happening after the minimum recharge plans were implemented by incumbents.
Reliance Retail has bought a 25.8 per cent stake in Dunzo, India's leading quick commerce player, for $200 million (around Rs 1,488 crore) as it looks to expand its presence in online grocery delivery business. Dunzo has raised $240 million (about Rs 1,787 crore) in its latest funding round that was led by Reliance Retail Ventures Ltd (RRVL) - the retail arm of Reliance Industries, the two firms said in a statement. Existing investors Lightbox, Lightrock, 3L Capital and Alteria Capital also participated in the funding round.
Telecom gear makers, who are in talks with telcos, say that if all goes well, they are ready to roll out the first phase of 5G services from October this year and cover the country's top 30-50 cities (in limited areas) by March 2023. The gear makers expect the telecom companies to give them a heads-up about their plans as well as the equipment required by July, and have promised deployment in three to four months after that. India's main telecom gear suppliers are Nokia, Ericsson and Samsung.
Tamil Nadu cadre IAS officer K Rajaraman on Friday took charge as the new telecom secretary. His joining comes following the superannuation of Anshu Prakash on September 30. "Shri K Rajaraman, IAS (TN:89) takes charge as Secretary, @DoT_India in presence of senior officials of the department," a PIB tweet said. He was serving as the additional secretary for investments at the Department of Economic Affairs before being promoted to the position of secretary, DoT.
RIL is setting up infrastructure for a full-fledged horizontal e-commerce offering - internally called the New Commerce - to simultaneously launch pan-India by October-November.
Commercial 5G services will be rolled out in 13 cities in India, including the metropolises, in 2022, the Department of Telecommunications (DoT) said in a statement on Monday. These cities are Delhi, Gurugram, Mumbai, Pune, Chennai, Kolkata, Bengaluru, Hyderabad, Chandigarh, Lucknow, Ahmedabad, Gandhinagar, and Jamnagar. "These metros and big cities would be the first places for the launch of 5G services in the country next year," the DoT said.
While the investment amount could not be immediately ascertained, a report pegged it at about $2 billion.
The company raised Rs 53,124 crore through a rights issue and sold nearly 33 per cent stake in Jio Platforms Ltd - the firm that houses telecom business and apps - to likes of Facebook and Google for Rs 152,056 crore.
Thanks to a $5.7 billion deal with Facebook, a Rs 53,125 crore rights issue and more stake sale to companies such as Saudi Aramco, the target is likely to be achieved by December.
"Starting today (on Wednesday), Airtel Xstream Fibre is available to homes, SOHO (Small Office Home Office) and small commercial establishments in Delhi, Gurgaon, Faridabad, Noida, Ghaziabad, Mumbai, Pune, Bangalore, Hyderabad, Chennai, Chandigarh, Kolkata, Indore, Jaipur and Ahmedabad," Bharti Airtel said in a statement.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi's call to make this decade a "techade" for India and the push for 5G, semiconductors and transformation through digital services is going to boost the technology sector in the country, industry players said on Monday. Modi, in his speech on the 76th Independence Day, touched upon all-round development of technology in the country, from 5G to push for electronic chips, laying of optical fibre cable (OFC) network across villages and enablement of digital entrepreneurship in villages through Common Services Centres, making the present decade as "techade" for India. Homegrown mobile devices maker Lava International's Chairman and Managing Director Hari Om Rai said electronics and technology sectors create about $4 trillion of revenue.
It has invested $2 billion and spent $200 million on its R&D centre in Bengaluru, the largest such centre outside China where some core technologies are under development.
Credit Suisse said if the deal fructifies, then this will bring together the largest offline and online retailers in India.
Across the world, there are around 150 trials on 5G currently going on and India has lagged behind. The government has now formed a committee which will look exclusively at developing a model for conducting 5G field trials, reports Kiran Rathee.
This year's list includes 40 influential people under 40 years of age in five categories -- finance, technology, healthcare, government and politics, and media and entertainment.
Meesho has emerged as the second-largest player by order share in this year's festive sales till now, surpassing Amazon, while Flipkart Group platforms topped the market in both orders and gross merchandise value (GMV), according to according to a report by consultancy firm Redseer. It said Flipkart Group maintained its leadership position with a 62 per cent market share in terms of GMV during the first week of the festive season, followed by Amazon which had 26 per cent share, while the remaining 12 per cent was distributed among other e-commerce players. In terms of order volume, Flipkart Group again leads the market with about 49 per cent share and SoftBank-backed Meesho ranks second with about 21 per cent order share, according to Redseer.
Mukesh Ambani's Jio, high debt and some bad decisions drove RCom to its grave.
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.
What worked for Airtel was that its data traffic growth was 13 per cent sequentially and its average data usage was even higher than Jio's at 11.9 gigabyte per month per user.
Kotak Bank rose the most among Sensex scrips, spurting 2.92 per cent amid reports that LIC will up its stake in the private lender to 10 per cent. Gains in HCL Tech, TCS, Infosys, HDFC Bank, Bajaj Finance and Titan helped Sensex close in the green. NSE Nifty edged higher by 27.50 points to end at 17,053.95.
Foreign brokerage firm CLSA initiated coverage on the stock with a Sell rating and target price of Rs 1,095, citing hefty premium valuation.
Betting as a function of pure luck is banned in the country, but games of skill with monetary stakes are not.
Its trajectory in telecom is well known but now it is pushing for a similar leap into the ranks of the top players in its other businesses: media and entertainment, e-commerce, a series of online businesses ranging from health to education, and retail.
With RIL's market capitalisation crossing the Rs 11-trillion mark on Friday, Ambani is ahead of Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, the 10th and 11th richest, respectively, and behind Zara founder Amancio Ortega on the Forbes Real-time Billionaires List.
The temptation to get into businesses that are hot is perhaps too great for any politician, no matter what his public slogans are. Nehru plunged into hot sectors of his time -- engineering and iron and steel. Modi has plunged into digital payments -- the hot sector of his time, notes Debashis Basu.
The Tata group on Thursday launched its super app, Tata Neu, bringing all its brands in one platform as it seeks to play a major role in the Indian ecommerce space currently dominated by the likes of Amazon and Flipkart.
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