Word: cellular
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Hong Kong's Hutchison Whampoa and AT&T Wireless. Other rivals are piling in: a government phone company, Bharat Sanchar Nigam, is expanding its mobile network. And in December, India's powerful Ambani family, which controls Reliance Industries, India's largest private sector company, is launching a discount national cellular service. Industry experts say the market is becoming too crowded given India's relatively poor population?and Mittal is fighting on too many fronts. "He's chewed way more than he can eat," says an executive at a foreign telecom firm in New Delhi. "If I were Sunil Mittal...
...financially-strapped companies, he acquired control of operators in the huge southern Indian city of Madras and two other rich southern states. In one case, Mittal bought out a rival over a weekend. One Friday night in 2001, Bharti was contacted by an investment banker representing Spice, a cellular carrier with a franchise in Calcutta, the capital of West Bengal state, and asked if they were interested in a deal. At the time, Bharti was considering an independent bid for a license to serve the area. The deadline was the following Monday. The two sides met at Bharti's Delhi...
...Bharti may be India's No. 1 cellular company today, but Mittal's challenges are far from over. The company's Bombay-listed shares are down nearly 50% from their February debut, reflecting investment uncertainty as much as general telecom jitters. Bharti is taking on well-entrenched competitors in mobile, fixed-line and long-distance services all at once. The regulatory environment, though improved, is still a minefield. The industry is facing a period of ferocious infighting for market share. Call rates?already the lowest in the world at under 3 a minute?are expected to keep falling, jeopardizing profitability...
...Reliance, which already has a foothold in the market through a separate cellular subsidiary, poses such a threat that the established mobile operators have taken regulators to court to try to block the launch. Reliance, they argue, is slipping into the cellular business through a back door, without a proper license. The Supreme Court is currently hearing the case; a verdict is expected in early December. Analysts expect that Reliance, and other phone companies launching similar services, will be able to move ahead. Spokespeople for Reliance and India's telecom regulatory agency decline to comment on the issue because...
...billion population helped the country to rocket from backwater to the world's biggest mobile phone market, with nearly 200 million subscribers, in just a few years. (The U.S., in second place, has about 150 million.) But now, the law of large numbers is working against the country's cellular duopoly, China Mobile and China Unicom. Earlier this year, China's heady subscriber growth rate started to sag; after surging 60% in 2000 and 88% in 2001, growth this year is projected to fall to 40%. Suddenly China isn't the world's hottest market?that's India, where annual...