American Tower Corp (ATC) CEO Tom Barlett has said the \u201cstructural and process reforms\u201d for the telecom industry recently announced by the Indian government would help cash-strapped Vodafone Idea (Vi) turn around and boost investments.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019re hopeful that it (read: measures taken by India\u2019s Union government) will now give Vodafone (Idea) some more air in their tires to be able to turn around and continue to \u2013 or increase the overall investment that they have in the marketplace\u2026and if that’s the case, we would see a really good construct for gross new business increasing in the marketplace,\u201d Barlett said at a recent Goldman Sachs event in the US. <\/p>\n
The ATC chief executive is also \u201ccautiously optimistic\u201d about the telecom market in India, and believes the US-based telecom tower company will be \u201cable to get back up into those mid-single-digit types of growth rates in the not-too-distant future\u201d. <\/p>\n
Earlier this month, the government announced a four-year moratorium on adjusted gross revenue (AGR) and spectrum payments, a move that offers Vi significant cash flow relief as the telco can defer cumulative payout of nearly Rs 1 lakh crore \u2013 around Rs 25,000 crore annually – over the next four years. <\/p>\n
Loss-making Vi has been weighed down by Rs 1.91 lakh-crore of net debt, of which as much as Rs 1.6 lakh-crore is to be paid to the government. It has also been losing millions of customers every quarter due to its inability to invest adequately in expanding its 4G network. This is also since Vi has still not managed to close its targeted Rs 25,000 crore fundraise. <\/p>\n
Barlett said India\u2019s telecom sector had \u201cbeen through a tough space for operators in the past two to three years,\u201d but recent relief measures taken by the Indian government provide a \u201cgreat backdrop\u201d for the industry, and that now \u201cit\u2019s a case of being patient.\u201d <\/p>\n
The ATC chief executive also underlined that telecom operators in India have a \u201csignificant amount of debt\u201d and that \u201cmost of it is to the government.\u201d <\/p>\n
Barlett, expects India\u2019s top two telcos, Reliance Jio and Bharti Airtel to \u201ccontinue to invest heavily in the market. \u201cIt\u2019s a big market\u2026they have new spectrum in the marketplace, (and) my sense is that they\u2019ll have more new spectrum in the marketplace, and more flexibility in terms of how to use it.\u201d <\/p>\n
Bartlett also said the government\u2019s decision to extend the tenure of spectrum licences (from 20 to 30 years) offers telecom operators \u201cmore comfort on rolling out infrastructure within each one of those bands.\u201d <\/p>\n
He said that though ATC had witnessed \u201coutsized net growth\u201d when it originally entered the Indian telecom market, the company\u2019s growth eventually was \u201cclamped down\u201d as the Indian telecom market underwent \u201cconsolidation\u201d and went \u201cthrough some of the regulatory patch issues.\u201d <\/p>\n
Bartlett, though, said that ATC still witnesses \u201cgood\u201d gross additions \u201cjust because of the dynamics of how many people are there and what\u2019s being deployed\u201d by the telecom operators in India. <\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019m hopeful that a lot of that churn is going to be largely behind us and that now all of the customers there, including state-owned BSNL, are going to now be able to turn the spigots on and start to reinvest back into the market,\u201d Bartlett reportedly said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
American Tower Corp (ATC) CEO Tom Barlett has said the \u201cstructural and process reforms\u201d for the telecom industry recently announced by the Indian government would help cash-strapped Vodafone Idea (Vi) turn around and boost investments. \u201cWe\u2019re hopeful that it (read: measures taken by India\u2019s Union government) will now give Vodafone (Idea) some more air in their tires to be able to turn around and continue to \u2013 or increase the overall investment that they have in the marketplace\u2026and if that’s the case, we would see a really good construct for gross new business increasing in the marketplace,\u201d Barlett said at […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-799027","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-telecom"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/telecomlive.in\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/799027","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/telecomlive.in\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/telecomlive.in\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/telecomlive.in\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/telecomlive.in\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=799027"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/telecomlive.in\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/799027\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/telecomlive.in\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=799027"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/telecomlive.in\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=799027"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/telecomlive.in\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=799027"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}