Biyani looks at the bigger picture

Without any doubt, telecom is one sector that has so far bucked the trend in India while other industries face slowdown issues. Not only this, companies within the sector have been able to grow strongly over the past few months, at least when it comes to ramping up their subscriber bases. The month of March 2009, for instance, saw the sector add a record 15.6 m subscribers, the highest in any month in the sector's history so far. While reduction in tariffs and cost of handsets has supplemented the growth of the Indian mobile telecommunication sector, growth in the recent past has been largely driven by mobile service providers' aggressive entry into the large and relatively untapped rural markets. In these markets for instance, carrying a Rs 2,000 mobile phone can be something of a status symbol. This is clearly indicative of the much-larger drama unfolding in the Indian telecom market, once considered a backwater and now the fastest growing in the world.
While the country still has a long way to go in establishing a nationwide network of landline telecom networks, let alone high-speed broadband service, we have already overtaken China in terms of mobile-phone subscription growth and US in terms of wireless base. The robust growth in the Chinese mobile phone industry in the past was due to an expanding rural market and the increasing number of people who have more than one mobile phone. I beleive these will be the very factors that will aid a superior growth of the Indian telecom market in the future.