Corporates wake up to Indian telecom sector

Analysts, industrialists and government all are suddenly wondering why their is this mad rush for telecom licenses in India, so much is the rush that Department of Telecom has announced that it won’t accept any new applications for mobile licenses from October  1st.  Of course after this announcement DoT has received some 200 applications in last couple of days alone.

The front runners  for licenses are the reality majors which includes DLF, Unitech, Jaypee group, Indiabulls, Parsvnath and Omaxe. Other notable names in the race are the Hinduja group, Videocon, Shyam telelink. DoT has some 200 odd applications for Universal Access Service Licenses ( UASL) . UASL comes with 2G spectrum and ability to offer IPTV.

The question on everybody’s mind is….Why Why Why

Well, the subscriber base in India is growing at 8 million per month which is soon expected to touch 10 million. Teledensity is very low at 20%. DoT is thinking of allowing only a limited number of players. The telecom sector is consistently outperforming the sensex and Bharti and Reliance communicatoins are the darlings of Dalal street. Their are very few companies in the telecom space (9 -10). When the reality market goes for a downswing the reality firms will have something to show on their balance sheet. Telecom market in India is still in it’s early stages with most of the revenue coming from voice based services. The market for value-added services is growing fast and will soon account for a huge chunk of revenues for the telcos.

This development opens up huge opportunity for mobile infrastructure providers and MVNO’s (Mobile Virtual Network Operators). Anil Dhirubhai group has already announced setting up of a mobile infrastructure company and a public listing of it. Airtel and Vodafone are already in a tower sharing agreement. Though DoT does not have a policy for MVNO but will soon have to frame one as not everybody with a license is going to set up it’s own towers.

All these plans might get delayed till the defense ministry frees up the reserved spectrum lying idle with it.

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Mallya buys Formula 1 team !

Great news for Indian Formula 1 fans. The Spyker F1 team has been bought by none other than Dr. Vijay Mallya of Kingfisher. And he tells some great things about his future plans for the team in this interview. So, we will soon see a F1 team with ‘India’ in its name and may be a Indian driver like Karun Chandok, who is fresh from his first GP2 victory, driving it too.

It is still not clear whether India will host F1 in near future but given this deal we can definitely hope that it’ll be sooner rather than later.

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Director, IIT Kanpur visits my room !!

Guess who visited my hostel room in IITK….yeah, the Director, Dr. Sanjay Dhande himself. Half hour after he is gone my heartbeat is still not normal. As soon as I saw him, I prayed to god that he did not recognize my face from our previous meetings which were not so pleasant, at least for me. And he did not, and I made a impression on him at least of an 8 pointer 🙂 .

Chapa no. 1: Was watching a ibn live video with a panel discussion on ‘effect of social networking sites’

Chapa no. 2: When he asked that why is the book ‘Marketing management’ in your room, I told him that I got it as a gift when I visited XLRI Jamshedpur on a free trip 🙂

And when he left, Dr. Goutam Deo who was with him patted me on back and said ‘you are doing good’ 😀

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