We had blogged about earlier on NTT DoCoMo’s interest in buying a minority stake in Tata Tele. Now the deal has been announced and the Japan’s largest mobile operator is also the latest entrant to India by buying a 26% stake in Tata Teleservices for a whopping 2.7 billion $ or Rs 13,070 crore. This deal pegs the valuation of Tata Tele over 10 billion $. Currently the userbase of Tata Teleservices is pegged at 30 million subscribers.

This is the third deal of an international Telecom company entering India with a stake in an Indian company. Earlier UAE’s Etisalat bought 45% stake in Swan Tele for 900 million $ while 60% stake in Unitech Wireless (which had a telecom license across India) was acquired by Norway’s Telenor for 1.27 billion $.

DoCoMo is known for its VAS revenue in Japanese markets and its innovations with technology and content services when it comes to mobile. It remains to be seen whether with the advent of 3G and this acquisition there is any impact on the mobile VAS market. Keep in mind that Tata Tele is a CDMA player and CDMA players would be technologically ahead of GSM players in terms of time required to roll out 3G services as their existing network can support 3G.

Related Posts

• Tata & NTT Docomo To Launch CoBranded GSM Services
• Airtel Launches 16MBPS DSL BroadBand - What About Tata Tele’s 100 MBPS Connection Then?
• Indian Entrepreneurs Count Gold On The Social Networking Business Model!
• Internet to become ubiquitous in India