Telenor is essentially targeting the churn market (currently ~50% per annum) and is focusing more on the urban market. Management believes that the large portion of the price decline has been taken out of the India market and anticipates ARPU’s to remain largely stable.
Reliance GSM is also looking forward to get the churn customers on board and have been really successful in Jan-09. Another way at looking at this is, grab the second chunk of spectrum upto 6.2 MHz from the initially allotted 4.4MHz.
Telnor further expects to benefit from the spectrum crunch of other operators and increasing proportion of data services revenues. In terms of distribution it plans to have 1m retailers in 3 years time.
Telenor plans to have 60% population coverage with 40,000 cell sites by Sep-10 – As per the tower sharing agreement with Tata- Quippo it would have 22,000/40,000 towers by April-09/10. Telenor would use inter/intra circle roaming agreements to build the network. Longer-term, Telenor expects to have 8% of the gross subscriber market share in 10 years (~75 mn subscribers by 2019).
Unitech and Telenor announced a revision to the terms of their original deal signed in October 2008, effectively lowering valuation for Unitech Wireless by 10%. According to the revised agreement, Telenor will now get 67.25% (original deal 60%) stake in the wireless business for a payment of Rs 61.2 billion (unchanged). In turn, both the parties have agreed that Unitech will not invest any more money in the wireless business for the next two years. Telenor will make the payment in four instalments by the end of CY09