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Vodafone Idea<\/a>'s chairman Himanshu Kapania<\/a> said the recent telecom reforms have changed global investors' perception about the government now viewing the sector as a key infrastructure provider instead of purely a revenue generator for the national exchequer.
His comments come even as the loss-making Vodafone Idea<\/a> continues to aggressively engage with global investors such as private equity player Apollo Global to raise at least $1 billion it requires to meet immediate repayments and keep pace with financially-stronger adversaries, Reliance Jio<\/a> and Bharti Airtel<\/a>. Its shares on Thursday touched a 52-week high of Rs 16.70, before closing 14.98% higher at Rs 16.43 on the BSE, on hopes that it will be able to close a fundraising shortly.
Top executives of India's biggest telecom companies also said that average revenue per user (ARPU) needed to rise further to give telcos the ammo to invest top dollars in the upcoming 5G roll-outs. They also called on the government to keep 5G spectrum prices nominal, encourage development of India-centric use cases and more sharing of active infrastructure between private operators to boost proliferation of the next-gen mobile broadband services in India.
\"Global investors are acknowledging the shift in the government's past approach of treating telecom as a revenue generator to the new policy direction of treating it as an infrastructure provider for digital services, paving the way for India's vision of becoming a top economy by 2030,\" Kapania said on the Day 2 of the India Mobile Congress virtual event Thursday.
Kapania's comments come at a time when things are starting to look up for the beleaguered telco, on the back of the recently-announced telecom reforms package by the government and the broad based prepaid tariff hikes that Vi took last month to boost revenues.