The much awaited merger and acquisition (M&A) guidelines for the telecom sector, after being deferred for a week, will be unveiled after the Empowered Group of Ministers (EGOM) deliberates upon the matter at its meeting scheduled on November 22. Telecom Minister, Kapil Sibal, underscored that EGOM besides deciding on the pricing issue will also take up spectrum related issues, to quantify how much spectrum should be retained by the new entity, among other things
Meanwhile, inter-ministerial panel Telecom Commission on November 6 approved the guidelines which will allow telecom companies to acquire operators in a manner that market share of the resultant entity does not exceed 50%.
Thus, with this M&A policy in place, country’s telecom sector, which has 13 mobile service providers, could witness some consolidation as this would provide loss making operators with huge debts and opportunity to exit the market.Vodafone India, which has around 17.8%, along with Bharti India already have expressed their interest to acquire another firm in India, once a clear M&A policy is in place.
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