Beside RIL's Jio Switch and Jio Browser, smaller Indian app companies who have been overwhelmed by TikTok are again seeing a big rush - even though till the second week of June they might not have been even listed in the top 100 apps in the country.

The Indian authorities feared that these apps were transferring consumer data to locations outside the country, especially China, in an unauthorised and surreptitious manner. With servers in India, the data of local consumers would be stored in the country.

JioMeet, which has already got the endorsement of top government officials and politicians, saw a huge surge in its ranking on Google Play, based on its downloads.

The mobile phone manufacturers are planning to plead with the government that the new rules suggested by the DoT could leave them with no option but to stop introducing new phone models in the country if the stringent rules are eventually approved.

Globally, the focus has moved back to India, especially in terms of telecom assets. Vodafone Idea, with some 300 million customers, continues to be attractive with shares available at a low price.

Work is underway in identifying global companies in sectors ranging from electronics, auto components and medical equipment to shift part of their existing or incremental manufacturing to India.

While Ola will be restarting services in over 60 cities across the country from Tuesday, Uber, on the other hand, will restart services in 13 more cities from Tuesday, increasing coverage to over 35 cities.

Private equity players said their research had shown that the PE share after COVID-19 could go up to 8-10 per cent.

The sobering news is that retailers - including big firms like Reliance Retail - and exhibitors are contemplating issuing force majeure notices to shopping malls and real estate owners, and are in discussions with them to formulate an action plan for sharing the financial burden of the lockdown.

'In the first phase, you might allow 30 per cent of the workforce to come in and see how it goes,' says industrialist Harsh Goenka.

Despite the failure of most e-commerce players to meet orders through the first week of the lockdown, there has been no serious crisis, thanks to supplies from 11 million small kirana and mom-and-pop stores across the country with the support of over 300,000 distributors and wholesalers.

'When 99.9 per cent of the most vulnerable are above 65, I see no logic in this sweeping lockdown in a country in which 94 per cent are below 65.' 'The most sensible thing to do would be to recalibrate this unnecessary lockdown as soon as possible.'

DOIT is a 100 per cent subsidiary of Morgan Credits in which Rana Kapoor's daughters Radha, Roshini and Raakhe, are directors. In 2018-19, the company incurred a net loss of Rs 48.76 crore on revenues of Rs 59 crore - a sharp contrast to 2017-18 when it had profits of Rs 2.7 crore on revenues of Rs 43 crore. To fund these aggressive investments into its subsidiaries in 2018-19, DOIT used debt which doubled to Rs 600 crore in 2018-19 from the previous year.

Feedback from telecom members indicated a 10 per cent increase in traffic, but no fears of choked networks. Telcos currently use 65-70 per cent of the network capacity. In other words, they have enough additional capacity to handle the new pressure without clogging the system.

In terms of market capitalisation, Zee alone has a market cap of Rs 24,000 crore compared to Rs 15,000 crore of the merged Reliance entity.

Based on Statista data for 2019, Vodafone has 17.2 million subscribers in the UK, 29.5 million in Germany, and over 13.7 million in Spain. Without Voda Idea, the Group will become smaller than Airtel and Jio.

The Indian market is more in sync with mobile markets of advanced countries like the UK, Japan, and South Korea, where there are fewer players - three to four.

Modi

The companies have offered to pay upfront the principal amount due for licence fees and spectrum usage charges (SUCs) on the basis of adjusted gross revenue (AGR). This amount will not include the interest, the penalty, and the interest on the penalty.

SRF