Bharti Airtel, India’s second largest telecom company by revenue, said it sees a “massive opportunity” for growth in India, its key market, due to the exit of all but four players. “A 3+1 player industry is a great outcome,” it said at…
Outgoing Idea Cellular CEO Himanshu Kapania admitted today that his company understimated the impact that unlimited plans would have on the company’s finances. Reacting to concerns about Idea Cellular’s failure to keep up with the revenue growth of Bharti Airtel and Reliance…
Bharti Airtel said it expects prices in India’s telecom sector to start climbing again in around six months or so, and indicated it has no stomach for further price competition with newcomer Reliance Jio. The comments by company officials come a few…
Kerala has emerged as the state with the highest smartphone penetration in the country, according to data released by CyberMedia Research, a market intelligence firm tracking the technology sector. CMR’s data also reveales that on a pan-India level, about 47% of the…
Bharat Sanchar Nigam Ltd could end up launching 5G services as early as the first half of 2019, going by comments made by a senior official at an industry forum today. Speaking at the Mobile Device Summit 2018 organized by ‘The Mobile Association’, Anil…
Bharti Airtel has announced a massive expansion program for its Mumbai 4G network that could increase the data carrying capacity by several times in one year. The expansion comprises four areas — increasing the number of cell sites by about 30%, increasing…
Idea Cellular slashed its employee costs by nearly 40% in the three months from January to March this year, and also reduced several other items of expenditure in a successful attempt to protect its margins from the impact of falling revenue. As…
Bharti Infratel, the telecom tower company from the Bharti group, reported a modest 4% growth in sales and 2% improvement in net profit due to a loss of tenancies as well as increasing fuel costs. The company’s revenue rose 4.2% on year…
India’s state-owned telecom utility Bharat Sanchar Nigam Ltd is likely to report a decline of around 1.66 mln landline phone users in the year-ended March 2018, the highest in its history. During the first ten months of the just-concluded financial year, the…
Financial services firm Credit Suisse said sales of Jiophone, which had begun to lose steam after an initial surge, are now back on track due to the affordable Rs 49 plan launched by Reliance Jio. Jiophone, priced at Rs 1,500, is estimated…
Newly launched telecom operator Reliance Jio has overtaken market leader Bharti Airtel as the company with the largest telecom network in India. As of March 1, Reliance Jio had 4.48 lakh telecom base stations (towers) in India, compared to 4.31 lakh base…
The Telecom Commission, the top bureaucratic decision making body within the communications ministry, has approved a Rs 7,330 cr project to set up an additional 4,072 mobile towers in left-wing extremism affected areas, telecom minister Manoj Sinha said today. The project will…
The pain for Bharti Airtel, Vodafone India and Idea Cellular may be far from over as Reliance Jio is seen preparing a massive rollout of its low-cost smartphone that could deal yet another heavy blow to the incumbent telecom operators’ revenue. Speaking…
After advising restraint in the fight with new operator Reliance Jio, it seems to be the turn of Idea Cellular and its partner Vodafone to slash prices. Both operators have cut the price of the cheapest unlimited voice and data pack to…
Telecom minister Manoj Sinha today said that the government has ‘no plans’ to merge state-owned telecom service providers Bharat Sanchar Nigam Ltd and Mahanagar Telephone Nigam Ltd. Sinha also said that BSNL is going ahead with the outsourcing of operations and maintenance…
UK’s Vodafone is looking to combine its stake in Indus Towers, India’s largest tower company, with Bharti Infratel, the tower arm of market leader Bharti Airtel, on the basis of $5 bln valuation for its asset, the Economic Times reported, quoting unnamed sources….
International credit rating agency Fitch said it revised its outlook on the Indian telecom sector to ‘stable’ from ‘negative’ and sees the sector returning to revenue growth in 2018. “We expect gradual price discipline in India’s telecoms sector to drive a mid-single-digit…
Bharat Sanchar Nigam Ltd or BSNL, the state-owned telecom operator, said it has cancelled its order to stop unlimited free calls on its landlines on all Sundays. The order was issued two weeks ago and had said that the facility of unlimited…
Telecom companies in India have been caught by surprise by the increase in voice calls made by their subscribers in recent months, telecom secretary Aruna Sundararajan said on Tuesday after attending a meeting with industry officials. “They have been surprised by the…
Kotak Institutional Equities has withdrawn its rating on Bharti Airtel, expressing concern about what exactly new entrant Reliance Jio is trying to achieve in the market with its relentless price cuts. “What does Jio want,” asked analyst Rohit Chordia in his note…
