Bharti Infratel to Ride on Incremental 3G /4G Tenancies

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Bharti Infratel 3G 4G TenancyThe nature of growth in the tower industry has undergone a substantial change, reflecting the change in maturity, structure and growth drivers of the mobile telecom sector. The coverage of key mobile operators is now more or less complete. The focus is now on augmenting voice capacity and data coverage. As a consequence, the tower industry growth is being driven more by increase in tenancies than through new tower additions.

According to Bharti Infratel management most 3G sites are co-located with 2G sites and over
time, as data grows, standalone 3G sites would drive

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Airtel Mobile Data Growth on Strong Footing

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Airtel Data GrowthAirtel Mobile Data continues to grow vigorously (67% revenue growth Y/Y) and now contributes over half of the overall Y/Y India wireless revenue growth rate of 10% (5.4% of this 10%). Therefore, data is helping to offset the tepid voice minutes growth pattern. Notably, data ARPU at Rs25 (averaged across the entire customer base) now contributes 13% of the overall ARPU (of Rs202). This percentage is rising, thus helping overall ARPU.

One should note that Airtel India has not

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Uninor /Telenor Improving Market Position

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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

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Can Telcos Opt for Payment Banks to Push Mobile Money Business ?

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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

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Wireless Spectrum Sharing Negative for Reliance Jio

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Spectrum Sharing Impact on Reliance JioTRAI 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

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Reliance Jio Infocomm to build 4G WiFi services across Hyderabad & Telangana

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Hyderabad Wi-Fi 4G ServicesReliance 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

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NetEase & China Telecom’s YiChat Mobile App Reaches 100 Mn Users

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Netease YiChat 100MnNetEase 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,

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Network Experiments of Reliance Jio Engineers for VoLTE / 4G

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Only 8 out of 300 networks across the world currently provide VoLTE. As VoLTE is in its early days it will be complex, expensive and difficult, and as such, it may be more feasible to look at options via the circuit switch fall-back (CSFB) route. Reliance Jio can provide voice under the CSFB route. There have been limited deployments so far. Only the South Korean telecom market is an exception with VoLTE being widely used because of the availability of fibre across all towers, superior in-building coverage, and significantly higher consumer spending on telcos. Most operators are sticking to the Circuit Switched Fall back ( CSFB) option only as of now for VoLTE.

VoLTE Production in 2300MHz and 1800Mhz
VoLTE offers no obvious benefits except some minor

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Reliance JIo LTE – A Serious Threat to Reliance / MTS / Tata Photon EVDO Broadband

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Reliance Jio to Compete with EVDO BroadbandReliance Jio Infocomm‘s 4G LTE and FTTH is a serious threat to hi-speed EVDO based broadband dongles as a natural initial market. The dongle business marries well with the expected USP of Reliance Jio’s service offering – speed. High average usage on dongles (we estimate usage of around 1.5-1.8 GB/month/sub across the estimated EVDO dongle subs base of 8-9 mn in the country), low customer expectations on seamless coverage (versus handset customers), and no need for voice capabilities makes dongles a natural market for Jio to focus on.

EVDO Broadband offerings from Reliance NetConnect, Tata Photon and MTS MBlaze have a lion’s share of the dongle market

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Zomato to Add 1 International City / Month – Raise More Funding

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Zomato Expands International MarketsZomato is the leading restaurant classified site in India. Started in FY09, it is currently present in 13 cities across India and reported revenues of Rs306mn in FY14 (vs. Rs114mn in FY13). Info Edge (INFOE IN) owns 50% stake in the company.

Zomato is present in 41 cities including 14 in India and 27 outside. It has 750 employees in total of which 300 each are in the content and sales teams and 60 in the technology team. Initially the content team develops the profile of restaurants in a city and only after scale is reached in terms of traffic the sales team starts the monetization process. So far, Zomato has reached sufficient traffic to start monetization in 7 of 14 Indian cities and FY14 also witnessed significant

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