Airtel 3G: 1 lakh hook up

Within 72 hours of launch, 1 lakh hook up for Airtel 3G

Airtel has succeeded in enlisting over one lakh customers for its range of 3G services within 72 hours of its launch.

The response has been mind boggling with the total consumption of around 200 GB a day.

Bharti Airtel will rollout the services in 13 circles by March. Over the next one year, it plans to extend the services to 1,500 cities and towns.

In the 72 hours of the service becoming operational in Bangalore, around one lakh customers are enjoying a variety of services, including video call , movies and music, according to a senior company official.

Airtel will offer services such as video call, live streaming of video, high speed Internet, mobile TV entertainment through the 3G technology. Users can also avail themselves of the services through the existing ‘SIM' cards.

For laptop users, Airtel offers 3G ‘dongles.

PACKAGES

In a bid to attract mass trial and adoption of the service , the company offers packages of up to ten days. For Rs 8, under the Sachet plan , a user can avail himself of 10 MB of free data (one day validity); and 65 MB for Rs 63 and one day validity.

the company's cumulative spending in Tamil Nadu was Rs 7,000 crore.

Business Loans: Six Steps

Six Steps to Successfully Getting Business Loans

1. Decide how much money you need and for what purpose. Coming to a clear understanding of the purpose of your loan is key in selecting the kinds of business lenders you will need to approach since many commercial lenders specialize in certain areas. Some of your options would be working capital, inventory, equipment, expansion and new facilities financing.

2. Determine what collateral you will use for the loan you are seeking some of you options are your cash flow, inventory, equipment, receivables, commercial property, a new contract and personal guarantees. While you may not have to come up with 100 percent collateral coverage all lenders will want some kind of guarantee so start lining up your collateral.

3. Pull your company’s business credit report and examine it very closely for accuracy and any errors, the last thing you want is for something unexpected to prevent you from obtaining your loan. Also pull your own personal credit report and those you of your top management team or key officers and partners and do the same kind of through review as you did with your business credit report.

4. Prepare a good business plans detailing your business operations, how you will use the funds you receive, and what kind of profits your use of these funds will create. The profits your use of the business loan will create is key to any business plan or funding request, because it is from those profits that the loan will be repaid.

5. Develop a list of lenders specific to your loan needs your list could include commercial banks, commercial finance firms, specialty lenders, private lenders, and government loan programs. In selecting lenders keep in mind that while commercial banks have very strict lending guidelines there are many different kinds of commercial lenders who will lend to companies that banks will not.

6. Select those lenders you want to work with and prepare and submit your loan requests to them then give them plenty of time to make a decision on your loan request. The last thing you ever want to do is to try and rush a lender into making a fast loan decision on a loan request, or you won’t like the fast decision you get I promise.

In your search for a business loan there are many factors that are beyond your control, but these steps are six factors that you can control as you look for business financing. In troubled economic times like those we are experiencing now you may have to look a little longer for the business loan your company needs, but it will be worth the effort when you get the money you need to operate and grow your business.

TELECOM

Idea Cellular's key metrics

Beginning of operations in Mumbai, Kolkata will expand margins

Idea Cellular seems to be well on the road to recovery, with its fairly sound performance in the December quarter reinforcing its strengthening footprint as a pan-India player.

A marginal increase in ARPU (average revenue per user) too should be heartening, indicative of the peaking out of competitive intensity that ate into the margins of players across the industry over the past 18 months.

Revenues for the quarter increased by 25.6 per cent over the same period last fiscal to Rs 3,956 crore, while net profits expanded by 42.8 per cent to Rs 243 crore.

Sequentially too, revenues and profits have grown at a healthy pace.

Key metrics improve

Over the past year, the company has steadily moved into newer circles and now has country-wide operations. Despite expanding operations, Idea has managed to keep its operating margins steady at 24 per cent levels. While it is expanding margins in its 13 established service areas of operation, it has managed to continuously reduce losses in nine new circles. With lucrative areas such as Mumbai, Tamil Nadu and Kolkata being among the newer geographies, there is sufficient scope for Idea to cut losses in these areas and expand margins further.

After many quarters of falling ARPUs, Idea has witnessed a marginal increase on this front, accompanied by a slight increase in minutes of usage. Realisations per minute have remained steady at around 42 paisa levels, which compares favourably with many top peers. The expansion to newer service areas has also allowed the company to continuously reduce its cost per minute.

The ushering in of mobile number portability would pose a challenge to the company in retaining subscribers. Recent data from Haryana, where it was first introduced suggests a net outflow of subscribers. It remains to be seen if there would be a proportionate loss of revenues subsequently as over the past few years, subscriber growth has outstripped revenue growth for players across the industry.

Idea has a revenue market share of 12.8 per cent and would hope for minimum erosion on this front.

Over the next few months the company is set to launch 3G services. This may offer sufficient scope to increase realisations as the 11 service areas where it has won spectrum account for 80 per cent of its existing revenues and would allow for a focussed customer mining.