Edited excerpts:
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What sort of response has the Idea-Vodafone rights issue got? Was it essential for them to raise funds for their rating?
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We do not have a rating on the Vodafone-Idea<\/a> entity. But we do rate Vodafone PLC. Given the fact that there has been so much of competition in the industry<\/a>. Voda-Idea merged together and they still have a massive debt on their balance sheet. While EBITDA has declined significantly to about $600 million or so, their debt to EBITDA remains quite high. So yes that was a necessity to bring in some equity into the business to provide some relief to the balance sheet. We believe this may not be the last time when they are injecting equity in the business and this business will have to do a lot of capex of $3-4 billion a year at least in the next 12 to 18 months. They might require more equity injections in future.
We did speak to Kotak Bank as well who were heading this transaction and they said that investor sentiment is clearly changing in a big way when it comes to the telecom space. How are you reading into a possible turnaround? What does the company needs to do in order to make up for the trust people have placed in it?
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Going forward, we believe that the ARPUs can grow from here on because right now at the current tariff level, all the three big telecom companies are not making sufficient return on investment. Jio’s tariff has fallen in the last quarter which is primarily due to the addition of the low ARPU subscribers in the rural areas.
But having said that, the situation has dramatically changed in the last two years. Now you have a situation where three large telcos have emerged with a similar revenue market share and we believe that Jio has a revenue market share which is very close to Voda-Idea and Bharti of about 32-33%. And Voda-Idea is in fact losing a bit of a revenue market share and they need to decongest their network for Vodafone-Idea.
Their network experience right now may not be at par with Jio and Bharti and they have to invest more on their network so that they remain competitive. They would probably need a large capex investment in the next 18 to 24 months to make their network robust and also to prevent any traditional churn from their network to other companies.
Sooner or later, we should look at the situation where Jio is satisfied with their revenue market share and they will stop discounting in the market and that will be the right time when tariff will start to grow from there on.
Can you just talk about Jio as well? Even they are looking to raise funds.
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Jio has definitely taken the market with the surprise. They have gained a large subscriber base now and their revenue market share is also clearly growing and their network is congesting. They now have to continuously invest on their networks to provide 10 plus GB data to their subscribers. And in the next one or two years, you will have the 5G auctions. So even Jio needs to raise money because they know that in future they have to do more capex and they have to spend money on 5G auctions. Jio has announced that they want to monetise
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