Sliding for the fourth straight day, the BSE Sensex shed 152 points in choppy trade on Wednesday amid mixed global cues ahead of the US Federal Reserve's policy decision.
Together, the top 10 business groups reported a pre-tax loss of Rs 19,342 crore during the January-March 2020 quarter, as against a profit before tax of around Rs 48,500 crore in the year-ago period and Rs 39,600 crore during the December quarter. While Vedanta was the worst hit. others included Aditya Birla, Bharti, Adani, Mahindra, and Tata.
The early bird results for the January-March quarter of 2022-23 (Q4FY23) show a pick-up in earnings growth, despite a slowdown in revenue growth, thanks to a decline in input costs and lower provisioning for bad loans by banks. The combined net profit of 66 companies that have, so far, declared their quarterly results was up 15.2 per cent year-on-year (YoY) in Q4FY23, an improvement from 4.3 per cent YoY growth in Q3. Net sales growth of these companies, however, slowed down to 11.5 per cent YoY in January-March 2023, the slowest rate in eight quarters.
Etisalat DB Telecom chief executive officer Atul Jham was also questioned by the panel headed by senior BJP leader Murli Manohar Joshi.
Bharti Airtel and Vodafone Idea have communicated to the telecom department that they will not pay AGR dues of Rs 88,624 crore, the deadline for which ended on Thursday, and will wait for the outcome of modification petition listed for hearing before the Supreme Court next week, according to official sources. Reliance Jio on Thursday paid Rs 195 crore to the telecom department to clear all adjusted gross revenue dues accounted till January 31, 2020, according to an official source.
The government has accepted the telecom regulator's proposal for change in numbering scheme for mobile phones, and is likely to allot '93' series to Reliance and '97' series to the Tatas.
Jio's spectrum trading pact with Airtel has enabled India's largest telco to top-up its holding in three key circles and yielded potential savings of about $400 million, according to a report. It is pertinent to mention here that Reliance Jio has signed an agreement with Bharti Airtel to acquire a portion of spectrum in 800 MHz band for Andhra Pradesh, Delhi and Mumbai circles at an aggregate value of Rs 1,497 crore -- marking the first such deal between the two telecom giants that otherwise compete fiercely in the market. Market analysts have termed the deal "mutually beneficial" and "win-win for both". UBS in a note cited Jio's spectrum buys in the 800 MHz band in Andhra Pradesh, Delhi and Mumbai in the recently-concluded auctions.
Following the October 24 Supreme Court order, the department of telecom estimated that the total liability of 15 telecom companies, including penalties and interest, would be Rs 1.47 lakh crore.
Powered by a rally in index heavyweight Reliance Industries, equity benchmark Sensex broke its four-session losing run to close above the 55,000-mark on Thursday despite a weak trend overseas. Investors made a cautious return to IT, pharma and bank stocks after their recent sell-off. However, a depreciating rupee and persistent foreign fund outflows capped the gains, traders said. Overcoming a lacklustre start, the 30-share BSE Sensex surged 427.79 points or 0.78 per cent to close at 55,320.28.
With intense competition in telecom sector, the two companies are rushing to diversify into other revenue streams, prominent among which are cloud services.
Adani Enterprises' proposed Rs 20,000 crore (Rs 200 billion) fundraising via fresh issue of equity shares through a public offer would be the fourth biggest by Indian companies, excluding banks and non-banking financial companies.
Telecom Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad said that there were 31 complaints of call drops against the company in 2015
IndusInd Bank was the top loser in the Sensex pack, shedding over 3 per cent, followed by HDFC, ICICI Bank, Tech Mahindra, Bajaj Finance, UltraTech Cement and Tata Steel. On the other hand, Bharti Airtel was the top gainer, rallying more than 4 per cent.
Telecom major Bharti Airtel led the growth in segment with net addition of 1.31 million subscribers.
The Comptroller and Auditor General of India, the apex audit body, has decided to audit the accounts of five telcos-- Bharti Airtel, Reliance, Tata, Vodafone and the state-run BSNL-- for 2009-10.
Government's resolution on the contentious issue of spectrum usage fee seems to have found favour with telecom operators with none of them withdrawing their application from airways auction on the last day on Monday.
According to the quality of service rules, not more than 2 per cent of total calls in a telecom circle on a network should automatically get disconnected.
BSE Midcap and BSE Smallcap indices settled the day 0.7% and 0.9% higher
Year 2013 saw business leaders facing the ire of hostile investigative agencies.
Telcos may have begun their WiMAX rollouts, but the results are yet to show. Consider this. Tata Teleservices which deployed its first WiMAX network in Bangalore in March, and is expecting to gather a subcsriber base of about 2 lakh by the end of the year, has enrolled just about 7,000 customers in the city.
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.
After a turnaround in performance by Indian equity markets since July that has seen the S&P BSE Sensex and the Nifty50 wipe out the year-to-date losses, analysts suggest investors start nibbling into stocks that are focused on the domestic economy. While they say intermittent corrections, led by policies of global central banks and other economic data, cannot be ruled out, analysts expect India's relative outperformance among global equity markets to continue as it looks better placed with a healthy economic recovery, and remains one of the fastest growing major economies. In this backdrop, Neeraj Chadawar, head of quantitative equity strategy at Axis Securities, believes that amid global slowdown, aggressive tightening by the central banks, and preference for domestic interests first (by the local government), export-oriented themes are likely to be muted or will deliver conservative returns in the near-term.
Benchmark indices bounced back on Wednesday after falling for five straight sessions, with investors snapping up the recently-mauled IT, finance and consumption stocks amid a supportive trend overseas. A rebounding rupee further bolstered sentiment, traders said. Halting its five-session slide, the BSE Sensex jumped 574.35 points or 1.02 per cent to finish at 57,037.50. Similarly, the NSE Nifty surged 177.90 points or 1.05 per cent to 17,136.55.
The freebies are now over, but Jio will need to notch up subscriber numbers and margins to prove its sceptics wrong.
Broader market underperformed the headline indices
Airtel, Vodafone-Essar favour delinking; Reliance, Tata oppose.
During a hearing before the Monopolies and Restrictive Trade Practices Commission (MRTPC) last month Bharti Airtel, Vodafone Essar, Reliance Communications, Tata Teleservices, and government-run BSNL and MTNL agreed to submit the undertaking.
Intel, the world's largest chipmaker, is understood to be in talks with leading Indian telecom companies like Tata Communications (formerly VSNL), Bharti Airtel and Reliance Communications that could bid for broadband wireless access spectrum to be auctioned by the government in January 2010.
Global markets trends, inflation, release of industrial output data and quarterly earnings will dictate movement of the equity benchmarks this week, analysts said, adding that volatility might continue amid slew of announcements of macroeconomic data at the global level too. Moreover, foreign fund movement, crude oil prices and trend in rupee would also act as major drivers for the equity market, they added. "The direction of global equity markets along with movement in dollar index and crude oil prices will continue to dominate while inflation numbers of the USA on May 11 and inflation and IIP numbers of India on May 12 will also cause volatility in the market," said Santosh Meena, head of research, Swastika Investmart Ltd.
In an interview at the GSMA conference in Barcelona on Tuesday, Mittal broke his silence on the scam and the very public spat between Tata Teleservices and Reliance Communications: "My plea is that the industry shut their mouths; zip up and let the various investigative agencies do their job," he said.
Bharti Airtel, Vodafone, Reliance Jio Infocomm and five other telecom firms will battle it out at the spectrum auction tomorrow, from which the government expects to garner at least Rs 11,300 crore (Rs 113 billion).
The Department of Telecom may bar operators holding 3G airwaves from sharing the high-speed spectrum.
The big beneficiaries of this move will be the big three -- Bharti, Vodafone and Idea.
Close on the heels of cellular operators announcing the launch of one-paisa-per-second billing scheme for all local/STD calls, roaming services and SMS, MTNL has slashed mobile tariffs to half-a-paisa per second on home network.
