INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
Jio stormed in with free voice services for life and initially free data services to lure subscribers.
Making money in a booming Indian mobile-phone market that soared from fewer than 2 million users to more than a billion in less than two
decades might have seemed like a no-brainer
Now it's more like a nightmare with losses for overseas companies rising to at least $23 billion."The promise of a market with over one
billion potential users is very attractive," Chris Lane, a Hong Kong-based analyst at Sanford C
"Too many licenses, too little spectrum, high taxes and supply-constrained airwave auctions has made this a very expensive market to operate
in."The $23 billion lost includes impairment charges and losses reported in company filings of global majors from London-based Vodafone
Group Plc to Japan's NTT Docomo Inc
- all of whom have exited or suffered as hyper competition has hurt the earnings of even the market leader Bharti Airtel Ltd
Expensive spectrum auctions and cancellation of telecom licenses in the wake of a graft probe made it even harder for the companies that
statementsThe entry of India's richest man Mukesh Ambani's Reliance Jio Infocomm Ltd
in 2016 has proven to be a turning point in consolidation for the market
The upstart stormed in with free voice services for life and initially free data services to lure subscribers, prompting smaller rivals to
merge or quit the market altogether."I suspect most of these would have eventually failed or been consolidated," said Lane
"Jio only expedited the process.(This story has not been edited by TheIndianSubcontinent staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated
