Bharti Airtel Chairman Sunil Mittal said the telecom industry is consolidating down to 2-to-3 operators the world over but the process hasn’t happened in an orderly way in India, and has come at a heavy price with a whopping $50 billion wiped off from the sector.
“India’s (telecom sector) consolidation hasn’t happened in an orderly fashion with $50 billion wiped off, although the merger of Vodafone and Idea has happened and we are happy with that,” Mittal said on the opening day of India Mobile Congress 2018 Thursday.
The mobile industry, he said, is a heavy capital-intensive industry, requires laying of fibre and heavy investment in networks.
The Airtel chairman said Prime Minister Modi’s vision of a digitally enabled India would entail tremendous levels of investment, and a deterrent in the way are the high telecom levies.
“Telecom levies are as high as 37%. Spectrum fee, licence fee are very high coupled with GST at 18%,” said Mittal.
Taking a dig at the government, he said, if the revenue maximisation is not the aim, then “why is there so much entanglement in litigation, and please let’s resolve this”.
The Bharti group chairman though thanked Telecom Minister Manoj Sinha and secretary Aruna Sundararajan for the new telecom policy, NDCP 2018, which he said, “captures all these elements”, including the need to “reduce litigation” in the sector.
Mittal also built a strong case for boosting the viability of tower companies, going forward. “Tower companies need to be made viable, and common tower infrastructure collaboration between the three operators is important, he said.
He was speaking in the backdrop Bharti Airtel’s tower arm Infratel’s imminent merger with India’s top tower company, Indus, which will create the largest tower company outside China, with 163,000 towers across India.
Greeting Reliance Industries chairman Mukesh Ambani and Vodafone Idea chairman Kumar Mangalam Birla, who were present, as his “industry friends,” Mittal said India is “not lagging behind any country” in terms of 5G technology adoption.
“Today, we have over 450 million mobile IoT (internet of things) users. India is not lagging behind in 5G adoption, people manufacturing the technology (devices) need scale and India China can provide that,” he said.
Mittal, who is also chairman of London-based mobile lobby group, GSMA, said in the international roaming space, “the switch on rates for roaming had increased from 45% to 65% and would reach 75%, which shows the abolishing roaming is on the way”.
On consolidation trends worldwide, he said, the upcoming merger of T-Mobile and Sprint would lead to three telecom players in the US, noting that China too is rapidly moving towards a two-player market in the run up to launch of 5G services.
Source: Economic Times