Fri. Mar 29th, 2024
Airtel-Tata Teleservices

Airtel is soon going to acquire Tata Teleservices as the Indian telecom sector consolidates into a four-operator market in the next three years according to the report released by London-based CCS Insight.

The report is named as ‘Halcyon Days Ahead in a Four-Operator Market’ which is published after a survey with 57 telecom M&A influencers. The report also featured intriguing alternative in Tata Tele merging with BSNL, but latter a route to privatization.

According to the survey, 68% of the experts (bankers, lawyers and telecom executives with deal-making experience) thought a four-operator market would prevail by 2020. The scenario will have three private providers each with more than 300 million subscribers and one state-owned operator with over 100 million.

Airtel seeks to consider a deal with Tata in order to maintain its leadership in revenue market share which have before diminished by the Vodafone-Idea merger. Sunil Mittal is planning to counter this through such deals, only if it comes at an attractive price.

Tata Teleservices has revenue of around ₹9,500 crore, but their revenue as well as subscribers are depleting very fastly. The annual payout towards debt servicing is around ₹2,500 crores on total outstanding borrowings of nearly ₹30,000 crores.

According to the CCS survey, Tata Tele is likely to be subsumed by Bharti Airtel, 22% believes that it would merge with BSNL while 32% of the people believes that it could merge with another network operator.

By Bharat