With two of the biggest telecom giants closing in on a merger deal, the vendors and subscribers, both have started receiving similar emails which inform them about how the merger will be a beneficial deal for all. According to the current scenario, the current deal should go through by next month, after which Idea Cellular and Vodafone will fuse to make the biggest telecom company in India. The first batch of emails was sent out to Vodafone subscribers and vendors by the Managing Director of the company Sunil Sood, whereas for Idea the MD Himanshu Kapania sent out similar mails on behalf of Idea Cellular. ??Kapania’s mail said, “The merger process is on track and expected to be completed in the first half of the calendar year 2018.” He also added that the merged entity “will certainly enhance your mobile experience by providing greater broadband speeds, better voice quality and indoor coverage.”? Economic Times reported this news first.
Kapania also did not forget to add up some numbers which would represent the newly merged entity after Vodafone and Idea Cellular come together. He said that together they would have 270,000 GSM sites along with a mobile broadband network of over 300,000 sites which would include both 3G and 4G sites, catering to 700 million subscribers, compared with their total user base of over 433 million at the end of March. To give you a scale of how massive this merger is going to be it should be taken into consideration that India has over one billion mobile phone subscribers.
The highest body of telecom authority and decisions, DoT is about to pass a final approval on the merger of both the companies. Except for the DoT, the merger has already been approved by capital markets regulator, National Company Law Tribunal and Competition Commission of India.
Aruna Sundararajan, the Telecom Secretary of India also shared some of her insights on the impeding merger of Vodafone India and Idea Cellular and remarked that she did not see any complications in the merger and added that she thought it should be finished by June.
This newly formed entity is said to bring a lot of disruption into the market since it will replace Bharti Airtel from its top spot of being the biggest telecom company in India with 42% market share and 37% respectively.
Apart from Idea Cellular mails, the Vodafone India mails also talked at length about the future of the new company. The mails essentially highlighted that the merged entity would invest in infrastructure and roll out smarter technologies, Internet of Things, better customer service, high-speed home broadband, digital wallets, cloud services and VoLTE technology. The emails also informed the public that this new company would have double the towers.
A big development was seen in this new turn of events when Balesh Sharma was appointed the CEO of the merged entity last month. Now the experts are saying that it is upon Sharma to get the new telco giant up and running since both Idea Cellular and Vodafone India have been late for the introduction of 4G services compared to their competition. Now this newly formed telco giant will face some tough competition from Reliance Jio and Bharti Airtel for market share and revenue share with all the telcos striving for the top spot.
