Adani v Ambani: Are India’s richest men about to battle over 5G? Vodafone to buckle?

tech.hindustantimes.com:

It was too quiet to last. A sustained and brutal destruction of capital in India’s telecom industry was only just starting to give way to a period of peace and calm. The three operators who survived out of the dozen on the scene in 2016 must have been grateful for the end to a debilitating price war. Stable market shares and decent per-user revenue would support the next round of investment.

So imagine the anxiety that bubbled up on the news that billionaire Gautam Adani — the port and airport owner who’s so far had nothing to do with telecom — will bid for 5G spectrum in this month’s auction.

Six years, ago it was another tycoon — Mukesh Ambani — who disrupted India’s wireless market with cheap data and free calls. He’s now the market leader with 410 million subscribers. To core telco revenue, add services like digital advertising, e-health and mobile education, where big rewards are still some years away. All told, Ambani’s Jio Platforms Ltd., in which Meta Platforms Inc. and Alphabet Inc. are investors, is a $95 billion enterprise, 17% bigger than the hydrocarbons empire he inherited from his dad, according to Jefferies.

Should Ambani now prepare for an Adani assault? They’re rivals who have so far managed to move in separate orbits. Ambani built up scale in consumer businesses like telecom and retail to shed the group’s overdependence on refining and petrochemicals. Adani went after industrial and utility-scale customers in transportation, coal and power. But they now have overlapping ambitions, for instance in renewables and media. Analysts at Motilal Oswal in Mumbai are noticing a “consumer bent” within the Adani group, which could extend beyond owning the country’s No. 1 edible oil brand. Could telecom become