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MUMBAI, March 10 (Reuters) - Aggressive bidding by Indianmobile phone operators including Bharti Airtel Ltd andIdea Cellular Ltd for mobile airwaves, betting on asurge in data usage, is set to see the government raising recordrevenue from the auction.
The government had received bids worth about 940 billionrupees ($15 billion) by the end of auctioning on Monday afterfive days of bidding, according to a notification from theDepartment of Telecommunications.
At this pace, revenue from the auction of mobile airwaveswill break its record of 1.06 trillion rupees logged in 2010,analysts and consultants said, as carriers seek to expandofferings and hold on to airwaves in some key regions.
New Delhi is also set to top its target of raising at least$13 billion.
"I think some of the companies still have an additional 50billion to 70 billion rupees to play and we will see more ofthat money being deployed in the coming days," said PankajAgrawal, director at telecoms advisory firm Capitel Partners.
The country's top four telecom operators Bharti, VodafoneGroup Plc's India unit, Idea and Reliance CommunicationsLtd are among eight players participating in theauction.
Bidding has been especially competitive in the premium 900mega-hertz band, with provisional winning bids rising by anaverage of 87 percent over reserve prices across zones by theend of bidding on Monday.
Final spectrum allocations to the mobile phone operatorswill take place after March 26 when the Supreme Court issues itsruling on multiple cases questioning the auction guidelines andcriteria.
In the latest auction round, the stakes are especially highfor Idea and Reliance Communications, which face the expiry ofairwaves in some key operational zones by end of this year andneed to retain bandwidth through the bidding process.
"Initial expectation was that the competitive intensitywould be high in RCom (Reliance Communications) circles plus afew markets for Idea where they do not have backup spectrum,"said an industry consultant.
"We're also seeing intensity going up in circles where onlyVodafone is up for renewal and that is increasing thecompetitive intensity substantially," said the consultantdeclining to be named as he was advising one of the bidders. ($1 = 62.6400 Indian rupees) (Reporting by Aman Shah in Mumbai; Editing by Sumeet Chatterjeeand David Evans)
