Uninor /Telenor Improving Market Position
Telenor India / Uninor reported robust revenue of INR 10.2bn, up 9.6% QoQ. This was led by healthy subscriber-led traffic growth of 4.5% and a 5.1% RPM increase. Telenor hiked its voice RPM by 5.1% to INR 0.241/min, but it was still one-third the discount to Airtel and Idea Cellular.
Traffic growth of 4.5% was led by strong 2mn subscriber addition during the quarter of about 6.6% subscriber growth. MOU fell by 3% to 449 mins after a sustained rise over the past five quarters. Telenor’s MOU was above Idea’s and Airtel’s of 401 and 433, respectively, due to its low price offerings, which was largely due to the 2nd SIM phenomena. ARPU grew by 1.9% to INR 108 despite the (more…)
Can Telcos Opt for Payment Banks to Push Mobile Money Business ?
RBI has released draft guidelines for payments bank licenses. We view Indian telcos, with their large customer bases and wide geographical reach (e.g., Airtel’s 1.5 mn retail outlets), as strong contenders. The overall objective appears to be to encourage financial inclusion by providing payments / remittance/ small savings services through technology based, high volume-low value transactions.
A payments bank will be allowed to offer services like demand deposits (maximum Rs100,000), payments / remittance services, and (more…)
Wireless Spectrum Sharing Negative for Reliance Jio
TRAI has released Spectrum Sharing guidelines for Wireless Operators in India. The recommendation to not permit spectrum leasing (at this stage) should be a dampener to challengers [New Entrants like Reliance Jio Infocomm, Uninor, etc] looking to monetize their underutilized spectrum holdings.
Spectrum sharing, as recommended by the TRAI, is unlikely to help challengers meaningfully. 2G ICR arrangements anyway have been around and help the challengers share networks from a coverage standpoint. Spectrum sharing, as highlighted earlier, is a capacity enhancing measure and hence, would aid capacity-constrained incumbents at the (more…)
Reliance Jio Infocomm to build 4G WiFi services across Hyderabad & Telangana
Reliance Jio Infocomm’s ambitious Telecom venture got a shot in the arm today as the company has completed rolling out 500 Km of optic fibre cable in Hyderabad alone and remaining 1,200 Km will be done soon. Reliance Jio will be the biggest competitor for Beam Telecom Which has one of the best FTTH Broadband Service in Hyderabad.
Reliance Jio has earmarked a massive Rs 4,100 Crore [$ 700 Mn] investment to build 4G WiFi services across Telangana which includes the City of Hyderabad, six other municipal corporations and 37 municipalities across the state in the first phase and expects to cover the rest (more…)
NetEase & China Telecom’s YiChat Mobile App Reaches 100 Mn Users
NetEase announced that the total users of its instant messaging app, YiChat, had reached 100 million. Co-developed by NetEase and China Telecom, YiChat was launched in Aug 2013. It took the app 11 months to surpass the 100m user milestone (Wechat took approximately 14 months to reach 100m).
Some interesting Statistics of YiChat Mobile Messaging Platform are as follows, (more…)