Sterlite – OFC & Network Technology Play for the 5G Revolution

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Vedanta group company Sterlite Technologies has over the years transformed from a pure play OFC (Optical Fiber Cable) manufacturer into a Network Solutions provider. The company now has 4 verticals – optical products (optical fibre, specialty cables), virtualised access products (programmable FTTx, virtualised RAN), network software (operating software and business software systems) and system integration services (network design and fibre rollout services). Sterlite’s manufacturing facility span across Asia, Europe and South America. It’s Software Innovation centers are all located in India.

Sterilte’s specialty cable capacity has gone up from 8m to 18m of cables and OFC capacity has scaled from 20m kms of fibre to 50m kms. In India you have seen the evolution from telecom to digital services after moving rapidly, from 2G/3G to now 4G. The industry will undergo further transformation, where apart from voice and data there is a new requirement of

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What is Jio’s 5G Network & SmartPhone Technology Plan ?

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Reliance Jio has stated that it will start developing its own 5G solution, which it will roll out by end of 2021 provided they are allotted the required spectrum band by DoT’s SACFA. Jio will most likely follow the ORAN (Open Radio Access Network), as done by some other developers like Rakuten in Japan. The general idea is the software developers will combine their software with general-purpose hardware (from Intel, Nvidia, etc.), along with radios from similar vendors.

Reliance Jio in conjunction with other local IT players, has managed to build its own 5G software stack and is likely embracing Open RAN techniques or possibly even Cloud-RAN as an architecture. This would allow them to avoid paying to network gear vendors (i.e. Ericsson, Nokia or Samsung in lids case for 4G) and potentially allow them to export their expertise to

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Covid-19 impacts JustDial’s Traffic + Income

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Chinese Virus Covid-19 has impacted JustDial’s Portal & App traffic from the start of the lockdown in India. Traffic has started coming back slowly on easing of restrictions in tier-I / II cities. SMEs are taking a cautious stance on advertisements.

JustDial’s revenue stream is dependent on spending on advertisements by SMEs. Loss of revenues for SMEs, on account of Covid, has driven them to stop / defer spends on the platform. Further, the business mortality may also result in erosion of company’s client base. Also, July collections currently stand at 60% of pre-Covid levels. The company highlighted that challenges in the business are to sustain for at least 1-2 quarters.

Tier II/III cities represent 34% of revenues and 55-56% in terms of campaigns. 55% of both listings and traffic are from tier I cities. Growth in tier II/III indicates lower ticket sizes (~40-45% of tier I). Also, the lockdown restrictions are

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Airtel gets Serious on 4G / Home Broadband after Jio OnSlaught

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Bharti Airtel’s operating performance improved progressively through the quarter. Smartphone sales (slowdown impacted 4G adoption) are now back to pre-Covid levels. Local and district-level lockdowns continues to cause minor disruptions. However, the management is not seeing any further erosion in its customer base.

Management said that the current tariffs are still at low levels. They have guided for ARPUs to move to Rs200 in the short term and Rs300 in the medium term. Besides tariff hikes, ARPU increase will also be driven by increase in share of 4G subscribers (better mix). Management did not comment on the exact timing for tariff increase. Secondly, the company believes that the current data allowances are way too generous and price architecture needs to

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Challenges Galore for Jio Platforms Entertainment + Super App

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Mukesh Ambani led Reliance Jio Infocomm Ltd created a new company called Jio Platforms Ltd in Dec 2019 which houses the Telecom Business along with the App ecosystem (Jio Cinemas, Jio TV, Jio Sawaan, etc) This was created to raise global funds with businesses that can command high premium like that of FAANG (Facebook, Amazon, Netflix and Google) companies in the global market. FAANG global tailwind, the very best global partners and a prized opportunity.

On the Ground, it is a flip-flop a complete U-turn over the past four years. At one stage, prior to Jio’s mobile telephony launch, investors were discounting invested capital by 30–50%, effectively valuing Jio at a negative equity value. The market is now extrapolating that Reliance can endlessly create value by doing more of the same and is incrementally ignoring

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Will InsurTech Startups crack the Trust Deficit and Win ?

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InsurTech landscape is quite nascent in India. This mainly comprises of Digital Platforms offering Complete Policy Buying & Management known as the Aggregators. The current InsurTech penetration is quite low, i.e., 2.76% in life insurance and 0.93% in non-life insurance compared to the global average of 6.5%. Lack of customer trust remains the key hurdle facing the InsurTech segment, and so far, industry players have found it as a hard nut to crack.

Digital Insurance Aggregators These are the aggregator platform that enables customers to compare and buy insurance products of both new-age online insurers and traditional insurance companies. There has been a significant uptick in the number of aggregators since

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How Big is China’s 5G Infrastructure Deployment ?

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On 21st Feb Chinese Ministry of Telecom announced a national policy to accelerate 5G rollout, aiming to use 5G Capital Expenditure as a way to stimulate the Economy after COVID-19 epidemic. This is similar to the response seen in 2009 post the GFC when infrastructure building for 3G was seen as way to get money into the system. 3G licenses were issued to the big three carriers (China Mobile, China Telecom and China Unicom).

China Mobile the largest consumer of optical fiber cable (OFC) globally, had announced its 2020 tender China Mobile Tender Points to Gradual Demand Pickup to procure standard OFC cables a month back. Our analysis of the tender had indicated an expected

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ICICI Strictly Enforces Data Leakage Prevention

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India’s leading financial group ICICI which operates in the domains of Banking, Insurances, Securities Trading, Credit Cards etc has very strictly enforced the Data Leakage Prevention Policy over the network.

DLP is a process inside ICICI Bank under Information security group for Bank’s Data Security. This process identifies any leakage of data based on the policies created by multiple Business Units (BU’s) inside ICICI Bank. DLP team monitor those sensitive / confidential data to ensure that

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Why Google / Microsoft Following Facebook Investment in Telco Data Carriers ?

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Facebook the Social Network company also owns the most popular messaging app for SmartPhones in India WhatsApp. Facebook, unfortunately has been running the Indian division under deep loss and wasn’t able to Monetize the WhatsApp Platform. iBankers bridged the synergies WhatsApp shared with Jio Platforms and Zuckerber readily agreed to invest a whopping $10 Billion in the newly formed company by Reliance Group – Jio Platforms Ltd This intensified the war of Silicon Valley Big companies relying on 4G/5G Data Networks.

Google has ramped up its digital advertising business geared towards programmatic and video advertising, Google is focused on building a subscription business in

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Fintech Startup / Companies in India

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We had covered the List of Payment Gateways available in India about 5 years ago. Our readers have commended the good job that we have done in providing coverage about the FinTech Startups in IndiaThey requested a list of all the companies operating in the FinTech vertical that pass our Ethical & Technology adoption parameters and here is the refined list.

LendingKart – Focused on Unaddressed demand for SME lending. We were excited by their usage of Artificial intelligence and machine learning driven underwriting.

BankBazaar – Platform offers bouquet of Loans

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