You have to give full marks to Vodafone Idea Ltd for trying. When the newly merged company’s management met telecom analysts for the first time last week, it made a fairly logical case for an improvement in India’s telecom industry. They also laboured to point out that the company itself would soon be on a strong footing. The timeline for extracting full synergies from the merger had been advanced by two years, which, coupled with planned asset sales and equity issuances, would bring down leverage substantially, it said.

Vodafone Idea is in the process to reduce the number of its distributors by 16,000, and branded stores by 2,000, by the end of this financial year, a company document said. The company plans to reduce the number of its distributors from around 43,000 to 27,000 by December.

It has around 6,000 branded retail stores, which it plans to cut to 4,000 by March 2019, it said.

New Delhi: Vodafone Idea Ltd is gearing up to fight rivals Bharti Airtel Ltd and Reliance Jio Infocomm Ltd with an aggressive expansion of its network of fourth-generation (4G) mobile tower sites and segmenting its markets into four categories on the basis of leadership and profitability with a specific strategy for each, said a person aware of the plans.

The huge debt of around Rs 1,12,500 crore of Vodafone Idea will leave little for capex and market-capturing strategies, even though the management is infusing some Rs 25,000 crore of equity.

Analysts at JPMorgan wrote on Thursday that Vodafone Idea “does not appear to be in a position to fund even basic capex, given the burdensome leverage”.

Vodafone Idea on Wednesday posted a massive consolidated net loss of Rs 4,974 crore for the July-September quarter, underlining once again the financial stress the telecom operators are undergoing due to below-cost tariff which is leading to customers migrating to lower average realisation per user (Arpu) offerings.

MUMBAI: Vodafone Idea, India’s newest and largest telecom operator, will on November 14 announce its first results since its inception, with analysts predicting a sizeable loss in its fiscal second quarter ended September 30, dragged down by low subscriber additions and rising 4G network expansion costs.

The divide between incumbent telecom operators and latest entrant Reliance Jio, in terms of subscriber additions, continues to prevail even though it’s been more than two years since the Mukesh Ambani-owned company joined the bandwagon.

Airtel, Vodafone, and Idea Cellular have seemingly stopped offering the top-up recharge of lower denominations. Due to the increasing demand for the low-cost tariff recharge tiers that combine voice, data, and SMS into a single plan, both the companies could apparently do away with the talk time plans.

New Delhi: Vodafone Idea Chairman Kumar Mangalam Birla said that India's largest telco's current focus is to merge the networks of Vodafone and Idea in the country, and refarm spectrum to enhance 4G LTE and VoLTE service in the country.

"A lot needs to be done.... we are working on upgrading and consolidating the infrastructure to deliver better services for masses," he said during his keynote speech at the India Mobile Congress 2018.

Telecom major Vodafone Idea Limited Monday raised Rs 15 billion fund through non-convertible debentures on private placement basis -- first debt after its incorporation.

"The Securities Allotment Committee have at their meeting held today i.e. on September 3, 2018, allotted 15,000 unsecured redeemable non-convertible debentures aggregating to Rs 15 billion on private placement basis," Vodafone Idea said in a regulatory filing.

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