In this round, the market has won. But it is still for Gautam Adani to decide whether he has lost or not, argues Shekhar Gupta.
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.
Rs 3,050-crore penalty on Airtel, Voda Idea gets nod. Final decision will be taken by DoT.
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.
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.
The call failure rate, Jio said, has been worsening rapidly in the last few days, while augmentation of interconnection capacity is still awaited
The government is planning to roll out 5G testbed in early January to enable small and medium enterprises and other industry players to test their solutions on a working platform, a top Department of Telecom official said on Thursday. For the promotion of 5G indigenous technology, DoT in March 2018, had approved a multi-institute collaborative project to set up an indigenous 5G Test Bed at a total cost of Rs 224 crore. A testbed consists of a specific environment including hardware, software, operating system, and network configuration to test a product or service.
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.
BSE Midcap and BSE Smallcap indices settled the day 0.7% and 0.9% higher
Apple's decision to slash its entry-level iPhone (8 GB version) in the US market will not trickle down to India anytime soon.
BSNL, Tata Teleservices and Reliance Communications, who also provide GSM technology-based services, are not part of the report.
According to the CEO of an Indian group with presence in the telecom segment and two merchant bankers, the Mexico-headquartered telco's bankers have been sounded out for preliminary discussions with leading Indian telecom companies for a strategic tie-up.
The uniform SUC, if implemented as per recommendations made by Telecom Regulatory Authority of India, will provide relief for mobile operators such as Airtel, Vodafone and Idea, but will increase rates for broadband wireless access spectrum holders like RJIL.
Britain's Cairn Energy Plc has dropped lawsuits against the Indian government and its entities in the US and other places and is in the final stages of withdrawing cases in Paris and the Netherlands to get back about Rs 7,900 crore that were collected from it to enforce a retrospective tax demand. As part of the settlement reached with the government to the seven-year old dispute over levy of back taxes, the company - which is now known as Capricorn Energy PLC - has initiated proceedings to withdraw lawsuits it had filed in several jurisdictions to enforce an international arbitration award which had overturned levy of Rs 10,247 crore retrospective taxes and ordered India to refund the money already collected. Two sources with direct knowledge of the matter said Cairn on November 26 withdrew the lawsuit it had brought in Mauritius for recognition of the arbitration award and took similar measures in courts in Singapore, the UK and Canada.
The sale of Essar Oil was India's biggest deleveraging exercise undertaken by any debt-heavy group
At $12-bn valuation, this will be India's largest FDI; deal to be announced on Saturday, says Dev Chatterjee.
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.
Under the UASL norms, spectrum is linked to licences, and a particular band of radio wave is restricted to be used in a particular technology
Nivedita Mookerji explains why a timely rollout of 5G may not be easy in India.
Vodafone Idea Ltd (VIL) CEO Ravinder Takkar did some plain speaking. In an analyst call after its quarterly results recently, Takkar said that the main stumbling block to raising fresh capital from investors is "pricing" - telecom tariffs, in other words. Nine months ago, the telecom company's board had cleared a proposal for raising Rs 25,000 crore from investors, after the promoters made it clear that they were not ready to pump in more money. But potential investors are concerned that without clarity on tariff hikes (there have been none for more than 18 months) they might just lose their money. The lack of visibility on raising tariffs has also impelled VIL to request the Department of Telecom (DoT) for a fresh reprieve by extending the two-year moratorium on paying its spectrum instalment of Rs 8,200 crore for another year till FY23.
A New York court has paused Cairn Energy's pursuit of US assets of Air India for the recovery of $1.2 billion arbitral award, so as to allow the British firm to reach a settlement with the Indian government on the long drawn dispute. The New York district court delayed the tax suit to November 18, according to court documents reviewed by PTI. This follows Cairn Energy and Air India jointly asking the court to stay further proceedings in view of the fresh government enacting a fresh law to scrap retrospective taxation in the country.
The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (Trai) has given its recommendations on the much-awaited issue of spectrum sharing.
The levy of retrospective tax on the UK's Cairn Energy Plc is a tale of bizarre twists and turns that saw its attached shares being sold in May 2018 amid the passing of the baton from a full-time finance minister to interim one and the talks at the highest level to resolve the dispute, to claims that levy of back taxes was a result of an investigation into Panama Papers leak. The government late last month refunded about Rs 7,900 crore it had collected from selling residual shares of the British firm in its erstwhile India unit, seizing dividend and withholding tax refunds, to settle an eight-year-old dispute that had tarred the country's reputation as an investment destination. But, this did not come about easily. For seven years, the establishment vehemently justified in courts and outside seeking of Rs 10,247 crore in back taxes plus interest and penalty from a firm that gave India its biggest onshore oil discovery.
'The kind of tax which will be generated from the second pillar may far outweigh what we may be losing in the first pillar.'
India's second-largest telecom operator Bharti Airtel on Tuesday posted more than twofold year-on-year jump in its consolidated net profit for the March quarter to Rs 2,008 crore, buoyed by a lift in average revenue per user and an exceptional gain. The telco said its Q4 scorecard was backed by strong performance delivery across the portfolio and its CEO Gopal Vittal, in a statement, exuded optimism about opportunities in the coming years and Airtel being "well-poised" as a company. Airtel, which competes in the market with Reliance Jio and Vodafone Idea, as well as state-owned BSNL/MTNL, promised to maintain razor sharp focus on financial flexibility, optimising the capital structure and finance cost.
Sachin Bansal, who had co-founded Flipkart with Binny Bansal in 2007, would exit the company
Reliance Jio's decision to acquire 700 MHz in combination with the possible use of an advanced standalone (SA) 5G network could give it an edge over its rivals, according to most analysts. The dissenters argue that the stiff price tag touching Rs 40,000 crore to grab 10 MHz of spectrum in 700 to provide coverage for its SA 5G network which offers ultra-low latency (unlike non-standalone or NSA), has a long way to go in India in terms of finding use cases that can be monetised. Globally, 700 MHz is a pivotal band which provides huge coverage, indoor penetration (especially useful in India where walls are thick) and is already considered by the European Union to be the 'pioneer band' for 5G, with 3.5 GHz and 26 GHz, both of which were auctioned in India recently.
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."
FM has agreed to dump an ill-conceived plan to slap a retrospective 20% levy on overseas asset managers
Mobile phone service providers alone jointly reported gross revenue of Rs 55,164.18 crore (RS 551.64 billion).
The problem is simple: None of the incumbent players, including Vodafone Idea, has a similar offer to challenge Jio and ensure that its 2G customers do not migrate.
Airtel CEO said, the 5G ecosystem is yet to develop in India and the prices are very high. Telecom companies including Vodafone Idea (VI) and Reliance Jio have also said that the current prices are exorbitant.
The company has made payment in compliance with Telecom Department's instructions for self assessment, Mittal said, adding that the Supreme Court had not mentioned specific amounts.
Telecom operator Bharti Airtel on Monday announced 20-25 per cent tariff hikes for various prepaid offerings, including tariffed voice plans, unlimited voice bundles and data top-ups, and said the new rates will come into effect from November 26. The entry-level tariffed voice plan has been raised by about 25 per cent, while for unlimited voice bundles, the increase in most cases is about 20 per cent. Sunil Mittal led telco -- whose India mobile customer base stood at about 323 million at the last count -- has also increased the tariffs for data top-up plans by about 20-21 per cent
UK-based Cairn Energy PLC on Wednesday said it has agreed to drop litigations to seize Indian properties in countries ranging from France to the UK as it has accepted the Indian government's offer to settle tax dispute relating to the levy of taxes retrospectively. Meeting the requirements of new legislation that scraps levy of retrospective taxation, the company has given required undertakings indemnifying the Indian government against future claims as well as agreeing to drop any legal proceedings anywhere in the world. The government now has to accept this and issue Cairn a so-called Form-II, that will commit it to refund the tax collected to enforce the retrospective tax demand.
Several factors have held India back. One is DoT policy somersaults and lack of clarity on whether to or not to ban Chinese gear makers.
After initial success, data use is stagnating and getting consumers to spend additional money for high-speed internet is proving to be difficult for telcos.
Ajit Mishra, vice president, research, Religare Broking, answers your stockmarket queries.
The management plans to invest Rs 27,000 crore in 2019-20, supported by savings of around Rs 14,000 crore that it expects to come from synergising operations of merged entities.
Airtel and Vodafone Idea are also trying to expand the penetration of 4G users in their subscriber base as they take this network to the hinterland
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