Shareholders of Reliance Industries have approved the appointment of Saudi Aramco Chairman Yasir Al-Rumayyan on the company board, with less than 2 per cent of votes cast against the proposal. Disclosing the results of shareholder votes on the appointment, Reliance in a regulatory filing said 98.03 per cent of votes were cast in favour of the resolution to appoint Al-Rumayyan for three years. As many as 10.89 crore shares or 1.96 per cent voted against the resolution, while 3.23 crore votes were declared invalid due to lack of proper authorisation, it said.
Based on industry estimates, telecom companies, including Bharti Airtel, Reliance Jio, Vodafone Idea and BSNL, are expected to invest over $10 billion on buying 5G telecom equipment in the next five years as they transition from non-standalone networks to standalone 5G networks.
With telecom disruptor Reliance Jio not raising tariffs, incumbents Bharti Airtel and Vodafone Idea are focusing on the minimum monthly recharge and higher first recharge offers to ensure they retain only loyal and revenue-incremental subscribers, reports Romita Majumdar.
RIL should wait-and-watch before investing in telecom sector.
The country's two top telcos, Reliance Jio and Airtel, are working overnight to undertake one of the fastest global roll-outs of 5G services in any country just a month down the line. India might be late in the game (already 70 countries have some kind of 5G and there are 698 million 5G subscribers across the world), but it's moving at breakneck speed. In his speech at the Reliance Industries AGM, Mukesh Ambani unveiled his plan to roll out the fastest 5G network in the world, starting from four metros in October but hitting every town taluka and tehsil - there are some 5,600 of them - in the country in 18 months.
Reliance Industries (RIL's) annual report released on Sunday highlighted the company's focus on new energy solutions, with chairman and managing director (MD) Mukesh Ambani stating that the age of fossil fuels will not continue much longer. RIL has sought shareholders' approval to give Ambani another five-year term as MD till 2029 at nil salary. The recently demerged Jio Financial Services, which "will leverage the prowess of digital and retail businesses", was expected to be listed soon.
Adani Data Networks said it plans to create a private 5G network for its operations. However, it acquired the spectrum in the last 5G auction alongside three telecom companies. Subsequently, it was granted a unified licence for access services, which enables it to provide telecom services in the country.
According to Ambani's presentation, data rates per GB are around $30 in Japan, $18 in Korea, $15 in China, $7.5 in Spain and $6 in South Africa
At the start of the auction on Sunday, Punjab Kings had the highest funds at Rs 110.5 crore, which decreased to Rs 10.9 crore before Day 2 on Monday.
According to a company statement, Ambani said he envisaged a new India in the not too distant future, where almost everything done digitally is transformed to a value-creating and life-enriching new experience cutting across all strata of society.
From its lows this month, the stock of Bharti Airtel is up 14 per cent. The gains for the telco have come on the back of expectations that market share consolidation, tariff hike and lower capex should boost margins and profits. While the company is a key player in the Indian market, it also has a leadership position in major markets of Africa.
Saudi Aramco chairman and head of the Kingdom's cash-rich wealth fund PIF Yasir Othman Al-Rumayyan will join the board of Reliance Industries Ltd as an independent director in a precursor to a $15 billion deal. Reliance chairman and Asia's richest man Mukesh Ambani, who had two years back disclosed the talks to sell a 20 per cent stake in the company's oil-to-chemical unit to Saudi Aramco, announced the appointment of Al-Rumayyan at the company's annual meeting of shareholders. Harvard educated Al-Rumayyan, 51, will replace Yogendra P Trivedi, 92, who has expressed a desire to retire, Ambani said. On the sale of a 20 per cent stake in the O2C business, he said the deal is likely to conclude this year.
Reliance Jio has accused old operators, including Bharti Airtel and Vodafone Idea, of "illegally" masquerading wire-line numbers as mobile numbers for "undue enrichment".
The announcement quells fears among some telcos that Chinese players might be banned from participating in 5G trials and roll outs.
Billionaire Mukesh Ambani-led Reliance Retail on Thursday said it has acquired sole control of 25-year-old search and discovery firm Just Dial. The firm's subsidiary Reliance Retail Ventures Ltd had in July announced a deal to buy a controlling stake in Just Dial for Rs 3,497 crore. Further to that announcement, "RRVL has now taken sole control of Just Dial Ltd in accordance with the SEBI Takeover Regulations with effect from September 1, 2021."
Further deleveraging needed to cut net debt and sustain operational improvement
Under the pact, Mukesh Ambani-led Reliance Industries' telecom arm will hire nationwide optical fibre network of Reliance Communications for rollout of 4G services.
Tennis queen Sania Mirza looked like a vision as she arrived to attend Anant Ambani and Radhika Merchant's Shubh Aashirwad ceremony at the Jio World Centre at the Bandra Kurla Complex, north west Mumbai, on Saturday, July 13, 2024.
The number of mobile phone subscribers in India decreased by 3.66 million in September to 1.17 billion, representing the first fall in seven months, according to the latest data released by the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (Trai). The number of subscribers had last fallen by 3.7 million back in February. In recent months, it rose by 1.08 million in August, 0.64 million in July, and 1.89 million in June.
Investments totaling over $9.5 billion in Jio Platforms by a clutch of private equity firms, following social media giant Facebook's $5.7 billion mid-April investment in the company, helped overall.
Bharti Airtel has paid Rs 11,374.7 cr while upfront amount due from it was Rs 7,832.20 cr
Airtel, Vodafone, Idea, RCom, Reliance Jiosubmitted applications.
As the nation woke up to images of Prime Minister Narendra Modi splashed across the front page of newspapers by Reliance Industries to announce the launch of its 4G services, Shiv Sena's Member of Parliament from South Mumbai, Arvind Sawant, was not impressed.
The Mumbai police were on high alert after an X user @ffsfir wrote a post about the potential threat which reads like "My mind is wondering shamelessly that half the world would go upside down tomorrow after a bomb went off at the Ambani wedding. trillions of dollars in one pin code."
India's total online shopper base at 30 per cent of its internet population is low when compared with 78 per cent in China and 70-plus per cent in the US.
Mukesh and Anil will announce two more infrastructure-sharing agreements by mid-June.
Many Dharmagurus attended the Shubh Ashirwad ceremony.
The Cabinet approved giving Bharti Airtel, Vodafone Idea Ltd and Reliance Jio an option to avail of a two-year moratorium on payments they were supposed to make in yearly installments for the spectrum bought in auctions.
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.
He was accompanied by his daughter Isha and son Anant
According to telcos and analysts, this is due to SIM consolidation happening after the minimum recharge plans were implemented by incumbents.
Chances are the logo would get even more colourful as its steps into new areas going forward.
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.
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!
If he bets big, billionaire Mukesh Ambani will emerge from this week's airwave auction armed with spectrum that could make his Reliance Industries Ltd a formidable rival to market leaders Bharti Airtel Ltd and Vodafone Group.
According to EY's private equity deal tracker, Brookfield-Reliance Jio's $ 3.7 billion deal is the largest ever PE/VC deal in India, surpassing the $ 2.5 billion investment made by Softbank in Flipkart in 2017.
The numbers hidden behind the results tell a story of zero-return businesses and lower prospects for the core units
Oil, banks eneded the day in green while few in auto sector lost heavily.
The RIL-RCOM deal is an indication of telecom sector's future. As the mobile subscriber numbers plateau, telcos need to look at alternate stream of revenues, and data services will be the key to their growth.
A number of investment banks in their research reports on Wednesday hailed the deal, saying it was strategic in nature for both cash-rich RIL and debt-laden RCOM.
