Showing posts with label IIPM INTERNATIONAL. Show all posts
Showing posts with label IIPM INTERNATIONAL. Show all posts

Saturday, October 06, 2012

TELECOM: MNP

Mobile Number Portability Promises to Usher in a New Paradigm in Indian Telecom. While New Players would benefit, The Real Advantage would be to the Customers

Clearly, MNP would create a lot of new game changers in India, the world’s second largest mobile market, and would pose many new challenges for the service providers. Introduction of MNP now certainly shifts the balance to a huge extent towards the newer players, who can now attempt to gain from poaching subscribers of the traditional incumbents. Operators would now need to invest significantly on attractive schemes and promotions. Investment would be required on the marketing front with key focus on quality, differentiation and pricing plans. New players will also have to be careful and ensure that the market share they gain in this manner is not fragile and can sustain for a longer time. Hemant Joshi, Partner, Deloitte Haskins & Sells, India agrees, “MNP will mostly increase the subscriber acquisition and retention costs for the operators, especially for the giants like Bharti Airtel who have the greatest revenue market share pie at 31%, Vodafone Essar at 21%, Reliance Communications at 14% and Idea Cellular at 13%.”

The recent trend had been that operators were becoming least interested in investing to improve and maintain quality of services as the margins had fallen to an all time low. As per a latest Telecom Regulator Authority of India (TRAI) report, as many as 24 licenses (out of the total of 211 licensees in all the telecom circles) do not meet the minimum metering and billing benchmark defined by the TRAI. The number is 42 in the pre-paid segment. Similarly, 27 licensees do not match the minimum parameter for 100 per cent refund of deposit within 60 days of closure of service. The report also highlights that the service providers have shown a bad response time to customer calls for assistance. The report released in October 2010 says that 59 licensees in different circles do not meet the required norms. All the incumbent operators including BSNL, Bharti Airtel, MTNL, Vodafone, Idea Cellular and RCOM somewhere do not meet the minimum QoS norms defined by the regulator. Similar is the case with new entrants. So far, TRAI has had a very little role when it comes to forcing telecom subscribers to increase the QoS. “The most effective tool that the regulator has is – naming and shaming, by which the regulator can inform the subscriber about his service provider’s quality shortcoming by putting the report in public. TRAI can recommend a penalty and cancellation of license, but cannot take action on its own,” highlights former Principal Adviser, TRAI Satyen Gupta.

With the introduction of MNP, a poor quality of service will have much more dire repercussions than before. Call drops, problems with the billing, network congestion, failure to have proper customer redressal forums et al would become more critical factors than ever before. Still, players will have to decide what their playing field would be – price or service offering. “Entering a price war is not going to help as there already has been a significant drop in ARPU and margins. Operators need to focus on the quality of services and customer retention plans,” says Abhishek Chauhan, Senior Consultant, ICT Practice, Frost & Sullivan, South Asia & Middle East. Acceptably, the tariff war is likely to take a breather for some time, as the call rates have already touched all time lows.


Source : IIPM Editorial, 2012.

For More IIPM Info, Visit below mentioned IIPM articles.
 
IIPM : The B-School with a Human Face
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Saturday, September 08, 2012

Greek Odyssey

Aniruddha Bahal’s The Emissary is a rocking chariot ride

Aniruddha Bahal’s The Emissary has grand ambitions. Pretty much as grand as one of the historical figures who appears in the book – Alexander The Great. Bahal, whose earlier effort Bunker 13 (an espionage thriller) found a worldwide audience (and also fetched him the Bad Sex writing award; consequently taken very sportingly in his stride by the author) writes this time on a slice of history in ancient Olympia exploring the universal and timeless theme of love and betrayal. He reasons that “The basic human emotions still remain the same. Adventure, revenge, hate, love, war. We haven’t transcended these categories to a robotic existence yet.”

The Emissary opens in Macedonia in ancient Greece during the time of Alexander the Great. Nicanor, an ace chariot racer, is killed by his own horses in a plot hatched by rival charioteer Argus. That leaves Seluecus (who’s also the narrator of the tale) distraught and in his quest for revenge he gets sucked into the mire that is the world of deceit and politics. The presence of Alexander The Great in the backdrop of the narrative makes it riveting reading. Basically, history suddenly seems intriguing and fun. Bahal tells Business and Economy that the idea was “sparked off (after) a conversation with Sir V S Naipaul who strongly urged me to read a lot of history to refine my fiction.” The conversation and the challenge laid by Sir Vidia “speed tracked” Bahal “towards the process of reading the history of ancient Greece.” He confesses that “the period had an existent charm for me. It was while reading about that period in the works of Thucydides, Arrian and Herodotus that the idea started evolving in my head of setting something in the time of Alexander The Great.” What results is a very good and eminently enjoyable piece of historical fiction, narrated in fairly contemporary language keeping the readability high.


Source : IIPM Editorial, 2012.
For More IIPM Info, Visit below mentioned IIPM articles.
 
IIPM : The B-School with a Human Face
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Wednesday, August 22, 2012

Deprival of the weakest

India’s water problem will continue to grow to mammoth and daunting proportions unless an integrated approach is taken. PPP is a great model, provided profiteering is curbed successively.

In a recent education tour to Singapore under IIPM GOTA program, we happened to visit an industrial plant of NEWater. NEWater is a joint venture of Singapore’s Public Utilities Board and Ministry of Environment and water resources. What is unique about NEWater is that it not only supplies pure drinking water to its people but also recycles water from the reservoirs of Singapore. This gave us an idea of how the state is committed to provide safe drinking water to its people and to ensure maximum replenishment of water supplies.

When we think of India, it presents a stark and unfortunate contrast. There is an ironic diversity when it comes to the availability of water, leave alone the safe and drinkable part. While hundreds of lives are in danger because of shortage of water in states like Rajasthan and Gujarat, which often experience drought and water scarcity, thousands others die in states like Bihar, Orissa or West Bengal, which are often inundated by flood.

Worldwide, an estimated 1.2 billion people drink unclean water, and about 2.5 billion lack proper toilets or sewerage systems. Over 5 million people die every year from water-born diseases such as cholera. In India too, about 70 million people in 20 states are in danger due to excess fluoride and around 10 million are at risk due to excess arsenic in ground water. In the gross sense (pun intended), about 10% of the population from both urban and rural areas does not have access to regular safe drinking water.

India is not very far from a water crisis, in a world that recognises that water will be just about as important by 2025 as oil is today. Over 85% of the rural population in Indian solely depends on ground water, which is depleting at a faster rate.


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Tuesday, August 21, 2012

Digest this!

It’s all about respect for Nicholas Cage. He has recently confessed that he eats only those animals whose sex lives he respects. Nicholas believes that birds and fish mate ‘respectably’ and thus he chooses to eat fowl and fish, but pigs on the other hand are spared from becoming his dinner as their sexual pursuits are not dignified enough! One mad hatter, that. We advise Nicholas Cage to keep further details on how he hogs to himself!


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Friday, July 27, 2012

“We are now Focussing on Specialty Fibres’’

Adesh Gupta, Director & CFO, Grasim Industries, talks to Shephali Bhatt on what Worked and what didn’t for The Company Last Fiscal

B&E: Grasim Industries reported a 37% yoy growth in profit in Q4, FY2011. What factors drove the number home?
Adesh Gupta (AG): The strong cash flow (supported by buoyant demand conditions) from our VSF (Viscose Staple Fibre) business was a major growth driver. In fact, the business achieved 100% capacity utilisation during the quarter as prices were in line with competitive fibres. The cement business also contributed significantly to our topline. Better performance came in from both the RMC (ready mix concrete) and white cement division.

B&E: How much has the overall market for sectors, which Grasim Industries caters to, grown in the last fiscal?
AG: Cement has grown at 5.3% in FY2011. The growth has been subdued due to de-growth in key consuming states of Andhra Pradesh, Haryana and Delhi; and lower spending on reality and infrastructure and non availability of resources like railway wagons, construction material etc. But we are confident that these are aberrations and that growth will revert to the 9-10% in the long term, given the huge potential which exists in the housing as well as infrastructure sector. At the same time, volumes were maintained by the VSF business despite a shutdown at one of our plants. Grasim’s growth mirrors the industry growth since we are the only major player in India.

B&E: But when it comes to full year, Grasim Industries’ net profit after tax plummeted by 43.52% in FY2010. What were the reasons for this massive fall?
AG: The cement business has been facing oversupply issues, due to which in the early part of the year, particularly in Q2 FY2011, the cement realisation and profits had fallen to unrealistic levels. Even the VSF business went through market related challenges. The better profits in Q4 FY2011 have helped in nullifying the lower profits in the previos three quarters of the year.



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Wednesday, November 12, 2008

Cricket World Cup 2011


Immediately after the World Cup fever of 2007 subsides the fans would be counting the days to the next World Cup to be held in 2011. The 2011 Cricket World Cup will be the tenth time the tournament would be held. The World Cup of 2011 is scheduled to take place in the Indian sub-continent and the four countries that are going to host the 2011 World Cup are India, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh and Pakistan. India would host 22 matches, Pakistan 16, Sri Lanka 9 and Bangladesh 6. The final of the World Cup will be played at a state-of-the-art stadium to be built near the banks of the river Yamuna. The 2011 World Cup will also allow the non-Test Cricketing sides to compete.

Source : IIPM Editorial, 2008
An Initiative of IIPM, Malay Chaudhuri and Arindam chaudhuri (Renowned Management Guru and Economist).

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