Bharti, RCom were the top losers in the telecom sectors

25 Sep 2009 , 07:17 PM

The Telecom Sector: The top gainers in the telecom sector were Shyam Telecom (up 14.5%), Gemini Comm (up 9.1%), WWIL (up 8.8%) and TTML (up 0.9%).

The top losers were Bharti Airtel (down 4.2%), RCom (down 3.6%), Himachal Futuristic (down 2.3%), MTNL (down 1.7%) and Tata Communication (down 1.2%).

An IIFL report released during the week stated that, “TRAI has formally announced the dates for implementation of mobile number portability (MNP) in India. The new dates are as expected– implementation must be completed in four metros and A circles by 31 December 2009, and in the rest of the country by 20 March 2010. The previous deadline for metros and A circles was 20 September 2009, so dates for metro and A circles have been moved back by three months and left unchanged for the other circles.

Among the important aspects of implementation are: 1) porting charges (yet to be decided); 2) preparedness of telcos (most telcos have not yet ordered equipment upgrades, which can take a few months to get done); 3) tariff-related issues (how operators tackle closed user groups being broken up because of porting, and avoid providing cheap on-net calls to ported subscribers); 4) 3G (this will be a differentiating service, and likely only from frontline telcos); and 5) CDMA to GSM porting (while handsets need to be invested in, CDMA offers significantly superior call quality, and if Nokia and Blackberry support CDMA, it can threaten GSM revenues in the mid-high ARPU segments)”.