Will biggest telecom mart survive crisis?

A bitter war of words between new operator and old ones

From being the world's cheapest and fastest growing market, India's telecom sector is sputtering as it faces life-threatening liability running into billions of dollars, a crisis that may alter the character of an industry that has already seen a painful price war destroying profits and push several operators out of the market.

The Supreme Court order for including non-core revenue in telecom groups' gross adjusted revenue -- the figure on which the levies are charged -- revived the rivalry between the old operators and Mukesh Ambani's low-cost upstart Reliance Jio during 2019, but there are signs of a truce with the rival camps agreeing to raise tariffs and also favouring regulator's intervention in fixing floor or minimum tariffs.

"We have fundamentally gone from an all (mobile) voice (calling) network to a hybrid network (of voice and internet data), to soon an all data network," said Rajan Mathews, Director General of Cellular Operators' Association of India (COAI).

And to survive, a floor price is needed quickly, before March 2020, he told PTI.

With 1 gigabyte (GB) of mobile data costing just USD 0.26 compared to USD 12.37 in the US and USD 6.66 in the UK, India in 2019 emerged as the nation with the cheapest telecom tariff in the world. It was also the fastest-growing telecom market.

But below the surface, a price war since the 2016 launch of Jio had ringed the sector hallow. And when on October 24, the Supreme Court, on a petition moved by the government, ordered payment of past dues according to its new definition of AGR, the country's secondbiggest carrier VodafoneIdea Ltd warned of shut down if no relief is given.

The total dues for the industry ran into a whopping Rs 1.47 lakh crore.

For an industry that has come from 7-8 operators to just three private players and state-owned fourth operator, the warning by VodafoneIdea sounded like a death knell.

The year saw resurfacing of a bitter war of words between the old and the new operator, and intense lobbying by telecom czar Sunil Bharti Mittal and billionaire Kumar Mangalam Birla of Vodafone-Idea.

Mittal and Birla had faced the brunt of brute competition unleashed by Ambani, as Jio ate into their user base and quickly grew to become the nation's biggest operator in terms of subscribers.

Airtel and Voda-Idea reported record financial losses but Jio continued to surprise the markets with astonishing profits through the year.