New telco Unitech Wireless has been renamed Uninor following the collaboration between Norwegian telecommunications giant Telenor and realty firm Unitech Ltd. Telenor’s subsidiaries also have different brands – Digi in Malaysia, dtac in Thailand, Grameenphone in Bangladesh, Promonte in Montenegro. The company does not have a website up as yet though it booked the domains Uninor.in as well as Uninor.co.in on September 11, 2009. It missed out on uninor.com, which is up for sale according to a notice on that site.
Telenor, which claims to be the 6th largest telco in the world, currently owns 67% stake in Uninor. Uninor’s attempts to increase FDI to 74% have been deferred by the government. The telco will roll out its services by the end of 2009. Uninor expects below-average ARPU in the first few years and is targeting 8% pan-Indian market share by 2018; EBITDA break even is expected in three years.
Low-Cost Operational Model, Hubs & Management
Uninor is adopting an economical growth strategy to gain long term capex efficiency by gradually building its network, sharing infrastructure (towers), obtaining GSM equipment at competitive costs and resorting, as other telcos have, to full-scale IT services outsourcing. It has outsourced its entire IT services to Wipro and is in a tower sharing arrangement with Wireless TT Info Service Ltd, the Tata-Quippo joint venture. This move has led to 75% capex saving per site compared to if the company had set out putting up its own towers. Uninor has also secured inter-circle roaming agreements and is now in the network planning stage, according to a company presentation.
It will set up 11 hubs for region-wise management – six of them are already up. The Bangalore centre will handle entire Karnataka, Chennai both Tamil Nadu and Kerala circles, Mumbai - Maharashtra and Goa, Hyderabad for Andhra Pradesh, Delhi will take care of Rajasthan, NCR, Uttar Pradesh and the capital and Kolkata will cover Orissa and West Bengal.
Uninor already has 900 employees on board and the management team is also falling into place.
Rural India
The company talks of ‘tailoring’ its offerings for different circles and focusing on select markets where it can build up its brand, but there is no mention of plans to tap into rural India. Even as established operators are looking to the hinterland for growth, and adding value added services such as crop information, weather reports, etc to lure the rural mobile users, Uninor appears to be focused only on cities, where ARPUs are higher.
Challenges
Flailing ARPUs, intense competition with 6-8 operators in most circles and high churn which is set to rise with other new telecom operators rolling out – S-Tel, Datacom and Etisalat DB India are characteristic of the Indian telecom scene. To succeed, new telcos such as Uninor will need to launch radically new offerings to boost ARPUs.
According to a company presentation, ARPU is expected to decline over the next few years before stabilizing. Spectrum will become scarce especially in urban areas, which is when we can expect to see more MVNO partnerships. Will Uninor be ready for the swarm? Tata Docomo came up with a granular pricing strategy and Aircel with a VAS spin – what will be Uninor’s USP?
Related
- Telenor’s Unitech Wireless Investment To Be Addressed By CCEA
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15 Comments until now.
uninor is to concentrate only on high ARPU voice users. Since there is no plan for high end users in the city and town. The offnet out going charge may be fixed even with 20 paise/mintue
senthil velavan
tele-tech would have been a better name
UNITEL also be a better name, since the Telenor being a norvegian company, it stick pn "nor"
Even UNINOR can give unlimited voice usage in an intra circle for 500 rupees
Uninor brand name sucks ! Coyld have retained Telenor itself. Indianising is not relevant in this case as Unitech is not a great brand name which ‘has’ to be leveraged.
well.. Grt Brand !! With its Globalising value.
I think this will rock in INDIA.
As per me a Customer can only be benefitted only by competiting pdts .So as being the 9th operator TELENOR again can capture some handsome % market share with its innovative product line.
Reports are ,uninor is gonna launch a service as below:
Local Users:Pay 200 or 300 for month and talk unlimited with in circle to attract new subscribres
STD Users:Pay
i think to survive in india,uninor must do something different…
company should have to give great benefits to the dealers & distributors,so that they also want customer to have UNINOR connection.
That's good it will make a revolution in the market
hi.. this is pradeep from bangalore. i am looking for dealship in bangalore so i need the address of operational hub bangalore.
thanking you
Good. With more and more compaies on board, the competn shud bring the call rate down and ofcourse service got to improve.
Hope the company leverages on the rural power as well. need robust distribution to challange the exsisting tele services.
your expectation is very good and I also think so, because the existing teleservices are of such type that it need more and more reforms.I think that it will fulfill all the expectations.thank you.Good luck.
the company will have to work hard to sustain in this competative price cutting telecom market.
DOCOMO VS UNINOR???