The Year of Infrastructure

"Every story has three sides to it–yours, mine, and the facts."

– FM Russel

For you–the industry–it is the cyclical feel-good and feel-bad phases,
that do change but not that rapidly. For us, the media, exceptions–good or bad–make
good copies throughout the year.

Once a year, with your active involvement, we do embark on a journey of
finding the facts. Follow-ups, more follow-ups, interviews, pages and pages of
calculations, arguments, explanations among ourselves...and lo, we are before
you with the facts. We are before you with V&D100.

There is no point attaching adjectives and ornamentations, you know what
V&D100 is–our best effort to present you with as much facts as we can on
the performance of communications industry in India in the year 2001-02.

Some of the findings will, of course, look too obvious to you, some will
straightaway challenge what you believed so far, and some will take you by
surprise. Facts are facts. They are not yours, not ours, they are just,
well...facts.

On the face of it, a year in which different segments grew at rates varying
from -26 percent to 41 percent, is at best a mixed year. But go a step further,
and you will find the segments that had a negative growth, accounted for less
than 0.5 percent of the size of the industry.

So was it a good year? It was, but that is not the exciting part. For
example, the segments that grew at the highest rates were cellular service and
mobile handsets businesses, at growth rates of 39.3 percent and 41.4 percent
respectively. The industry was a star last year too.

However, apart from the fact we have done some calculations, and put a couple
of numbers that can be quoted, there is hardly anything surprising about it. You
knew it. We knew it. The facts just reinforced it.

The more exciting part now. The carrier equipment business grew by 32.8
percent. Yes, no typographical error, no calculation error, here it is
thirty-two point eight percent. And it is not a nascent market that we are
talking about, it is the biggest contributor to the revenue of the total
equipment business with a share of almost 72.4 percent. But if you are still not
impressed, here is a plain and simple fact. At that rate, it is not just the
highest in the world in this business, it is almost double of our more
progressive neighbor–China. For a change, in telecom, we are now truly saare
jahan se accha. And that’s not a minister’s speech. It is the voice of
facts.

For those, who are into this segment