Bharti Airtel, Tata Communications stocks rise on talks of merger

Key highlights

• Preliminary talks between Tata Group and Bharti Airtel have been held to explore merger of telecom, overseas cable and enterprise services and direct-to-home businesses.
• The merged entity would consolidate the telecom industry further into three major players - Reliance Jio, Vodafone-Idea and Airtel-Tata.
• Airtel-Tata deal would leave India's telecom major with a total subscriber base of nearly 32.8 crore.

Exploratory alliance talks have taken place between Indian multi-national conglomerate, Tata Group and Indian telecom major – Bharti Airtel.

In a bid to evaluate mega alliance talks, discussions between the companies revolved around merger of its telecom, overseas cable and enterprise services and direct-to-home businesses.

A possible merger between unlisted Tata Teleservices and Tata Sky and the listed Tata Communications with Sunil Mittal-owned Bharti Airtel, including its wholly owned DTH arm, a report by Economic Times said on Friday.

However, the talks were still in its preliminary stage; though its consolidation would leave the telecom market with only three major players – Vodafone-Idea, Reliance Jio and Airtel-Tata.

In the pre-market open, Bharti Airtel was trading up 1.36% or 5.10 points at Rs 381.40 per share on BSE Sensex while Tata Communications was up 2.04% or 13.80 points to Rs 689.45 per share.

Bharti Airtel had a total subscriber base of 27,650,142.7 crore subscribers, as per TRAI data as on April 30. The company had added 285,304.4 subscribers in the same month.

Tata Teleservices that were losing subscriber base due to intense price competition had lost out on 1,463,220 subscribers in April, as per TRAI report.

The total wireless subscribers of the company was at stood at 47,531,333 in April.

This could bode well for the loss making Tata Teleservices who have been looking to exit the telecom market for years.

For Airtel the merger would bring up its subscriber base to match the soon to be merged Vodafone-Idea in terms of market share. Airtel will also get access to a ready network including 4G bandwidth in the 800Mhz band, the ET report said.