Archive for July, 2010
Dark Night Before Dawn – Signs of the Light
Indian competitive situation should improve as players focus on repairing their balance sheet. Tariffs have moved up in a few cases. Bharti’s African acquisition is now complete. Sentiment should move up as management unveils the details of their African Strategy.
Despite strong competition, Bharti has lost less than 120bps revenue market share in last 12 months. New players are launching to meet roll out obligations rather than to compete. Possibility of spectrum trading? Tariffs have stabilized over
past 6-8 months.
We expect Companies could go into a balance sheet repair mode thereby limiting competition either on tariffs or on Read the rest of this entry »
Jeevansaathi converting 15% profiles into Paid Customers
Jeevansaathi.com the Match making website from the Info Edge group unveiled that it added 1,646 profiles during the quarter ended June-10. The company was able to convert 15% of its new customers into Paid ones generating a revenue of $ 1.2 mn. Jeevansaathi at the end of June-10 quarter had 3.8 mn profiles. The following table shows the growth and increase in Average Price Paid / profile over the last 5 quarters.
Naukri.Com Performance – Lateral hiring has increased significantly in the IT sector as attrition rates have Read the rest of this entry »
Uninor Gaining Traction – Too Early to Decide if it Can Sustain
Uninor – the JV between Unitech and Telnor reported an operating loss increase of 19% sequentially to USD220m. Despite rising operating loss (cumulative operating loss at cUSD570m), the company maintained its capex guidance.
Revenue for the quarter increased sequentially by 84% to USD16m, but not enough for the company to gain some scale (revenue market share less than 0.4%). Rising operating losses for Telenor suggests a tough operating environment, but marginal improvements in wireless KPIs do provide some hope.
Subscribers – Active subscribers of Uninor improved from 48% to 63% and this, combined, with usage improvement, suggests some better traction (MOU up 40% q-o-q). Uninor emphasized its dynamic pricing plan [Badalta Discount] and suggested that c60% of existing subscribers are part of this pricing plan. We note that Uninor appears to have an edge over the incumbents and other new players in terms of the technical capability to offer location-based pricing Read the rest of this entry »
Forget Dish TV – Watch Live TV using Mundu on Mobile / Laptop
BSNL did introduce IPTV so did Bharti Airtel but only in bits and pieces without any real proposition from the consumer stand point, thus losing its sheen. Mundu, a startup catering to Mobiles has launched an Application very similar to Tata Photon+ TV which will enable viewers to watch Live TV of any channel that they desire.
You can also choose from bouquet of channels ranging from NDTV 24/7 to UTV etc. Mundu has also launched a Mobile App which when installed on your Handset which is assumed to be GPRS enabled, you can start watching Live TV. So also there is an App for Desktop / Laptop / Netbooks. Read the rest of this entry »
Sunil Mittal takes Control of Bharti Airtel Africa
The management of Bharti airtel hosted a conference call to update on the completion of Zain Wireless takeover in Africa. Excerpts from the call is as follows.
Management expects growth to be driven primarily by increasing 1) Penetration 2) Usage and 3) Data revenues. Market opportunity is huge, backed by confluence of higher youth population and high growth in GDP (>5% p.a.)
Tele‐density is ~20% with some countries as low as 10‐12%. MoU at 50‐60 minutes vs. global average of ~300 minutes and Indian Read the rest of this entry »
Wireless Spectrum – BWA Vs EVDO Vs 3G – Insight
Wireless broadband is the way forward in India which lacks Wired Infrastructure and where it exists, it is in the hands of State Owned Monopoly – BSNL. We’d like to enlighten on the current situation of the underlying infrastructure that powers Broadband in India.
RIL with 20MHz of BWA spectrum, RCOM with 5MHz of pan-India CDMA spectrum (which can answer high speed data needs as well as 3G can) + 3G spectrum, Tata (similar to RCOM), BSNL-MTNL (CDMA, 3G, BWA all pan-India), and MTS (2.5MHz of CDMA spectrum, which may go upto 3.75 based on TRAI recommendations) all have substantial and substantially unutilized data capacity relative toBharti. Till now, they have not tasted spectacular success, but over time, as broadband penetration increases (we don’t doubt that this will happen) those with more spectrum will be at an advantage. Read the rest of this entry »
Wireless Data + VoIP Usage to Explode
Data traffic the world over has increased at a dramatic pace in the last 3 years, and is set to maintain its momentum for the next five years, as per studies by Cisco.
In India too, this is likely to happen, and through a variety of applications, which may or may not have easily monetizable business
models. We are less concerned about the specifics of any application. What concerns us more is that over time, data traffic will grow rapidly in India, and the greater data-friendly spectrum holding of RIL, who has won BWA spectrum on a pan-India basis and some other telcos will expose the limitation of the spectrum held by GSM incumbents. Read the rest of this entry »
BWA Likely on WiMax First then to LTE – No Threat to 3G
BWA (Broadband Wireless Access) winners recently received wireless spectrum, our meetings indicate they are no in a hurry to rollout the services given the eco-system constraints and slower pace of equipment procurement. Based on our discussions with industry participants we believe almost all BWA operators will initially rollout Wimax. Some of them intend to move on to LTE (Long-term evolution) in 2-3 years of time, once the eco-system for LTE develops. We do not consider BWA as a near-term threat to 3G given its relatively weaker eco-system and launch in an unpaired band (as a result of which operators may not enjoy scale economy benefits).
WiMax Vs LTE Device eco-system Read the rest of this entry »
