After its acquisition of Tate Teleservices’ consumer mobile business, Bharti Airtel would be able to bridge, to a large extent, the gap between the share of total spectrum held by it and that owned by the merged entity formed after rivals Idea Cellular’s merger with Vodafone India.
Bharti and Tata Tele will together control over 28 per cent of the total spectrum available to telecom service providers, and that will bring them on a par with the Idea-Vodafone’s share across the country.
Also, the Bharti Airtel-Tata Tele combined entity would have a share of around 40 per cent in the total telecom revenues, not much behind the projected 44 per cent for the Idea-Vodafone combine.
Airtel has got TTSL in virtually a platter – it just has to pay 15 per cent to 20 per cent of the deferred payment for spectrum which comes to around Rs 1500-Rs 2,000 crore. It of course might have to fork out US $ 1.2 billion to the government if it wants to liberalise the 1800 Mhz spectrum which its gets from TTSL but the choice of that will be with Bharti. In return it has to absorb a large part of the 5,000 employees that the company has. But it also gets 40 million additional customers to the fold. As a result the combined subscriber share of Bharti will go up to 27-28 per cent, compared to around 35 per cent of the Idea-Vodafone combine.