Get Out, Get Going!

Telecommunications. One of India's fastest progressing markets. And a victim of government's moves too, it seems.

Use of cellphones in India has incressed at an excellent rate and we have more than 20 crore users, with an overall mobile penetration of almost 17%. But the market has lots of opportunities to grow which we can guess with the number of attractive schemes launched by the companies and public's response to them. It is also worth noting that even though we have a high rate of increase, we are still far behind the global mobile penetration of 44%.

In such a market, the fierce competition among various mobile companies is natural. But the way the government is trying to encash the growth, using not-that-ethical ways, cannot be considered as a very good practice. For example, the way govenrment asked for more money later on the spectrum allocation was out of understanding. If the 1651 crores was the 2001 price, it should have been changed earlier itself.

Probably this is one of the main reasons they're all moving out of country too. Yes, the telecom biggies of the country have started finding places outside. The CDMA giant of India, Reliance Communications, has acquired a licence in Uganda and is planning to invest big money in the African country. It is interesting that there are already 5 companies, MTN, Uganda Telecom, Hits Telecom, Celtel and Warid Telecom, with whom Rcom shall have to compete. The company is expected to start its operations by the end of 2008, and is planning to provide GSM, Wi-fi and Wimax services there.

On the other hand, the GSM giant Bharti Airtel had already announced its launch in Sri Lanka in January'07 and is expected to start its services by April '08. Sri Lanka, Bharti is keen to roll out Airtel in several Saarc countries, such as Nepal, Maldives, Bangladesh, Bhutan and Pakistan.

In fact, reportedly Bharti is trying to get an operating licence in Vietnam also, without any buy outs. Thus, our companies are really going the international way.

And above this all, Mukesh Ambani has recently made an statement saying RIL will emerge as a "successful multinational" by focusing on overseas business. Tatas are already going more global everyday with the buyouts like Daewoo Motors and Corus.

So the funda is simple now, if you want to progress high, get out and get going.