TelecomLive January-2019

Lenovo's FY18 India phone sales of Rs 6,881cr Lenovo Group's smartphone business, which includes the Motorola and Lenovo brands, clocked sales of Rs 6,881 cr in India in FY18, trailing more locally entrenched Chinese smartphone peers such as Xiaomi, Oppo, andVivo. Motorola Mobility India, which has been spear- heading the group's smartphone business in India since 2017-18, posted a profit of Rs 51.9 cr last fiscal. Lenovo India, the group's flagship entity, had moved out of the smartphone business in Apr 2017 as part of global restructuring. Hence, the comparative sales statistics for Lenovo Group's smartphone busi- ness in India for FY17were not available. Lenovo India now focuses on the PC business, but RoC filings showed it did undertake some sales of the smartphone in the last fiscal essentially of the unsold inventory as onMar 31, 2017. Lenovo India's revenue, driven by the PC business, was Rs 6,718 cr in FY18, which again cannot be com- pared with the previous year's revenue of Rs 12,004 cr that had included smartphones. The company's profit last fiscal was Rs 95 cr as compared with Rs 105 cr in FY17, reflecting the profitability of the PCbusiness. Rs 1,500 cr loss from illegal ILD calls in 2 yrs According to data shared by telecom minister Manoj Sinha in the Lok Sabha, illegal routing of inter- [ News Bytes ] 6 Telecom LIVE January 2019 www.telecomlive.com na t i ona l ca l l s l ed to notional loss of Rs 750 cr in 2016-17 and Rs 789 cr, excluding interest, in 2017-18. Vodafone Idea cut staff count by 1,800 post merger The number of regular employees at Vodafone I d e a c o m b i n e h a s reduced by over 1,800 to 9,881 , s ince the two announced a merger in Mar 2017, according to the annual report of the company for the financial year ended Mar 2018. There were 11,735 regular employees in Idea Cellu- lar as on March 31, 2017, which got reduced by nearly 16 pc in a year. The merger was finally com- pleted in Aug 2018 after all the regulatory approv- als. Ericsson eyes 5G sub- scription growth by 50 pc in 2024; US likely to lead Ericsson sees 5G sub- scriptions growing by 50 pc in 2024 to 1.5 bn, cov- ering more than 40 pc of the world's population. No r t h Ame r i c a a n d n o r t h e a s t A s i a a r e expected to lead the 5G uptake, with major US service providers starting to offer 5G services this year or in 2019, while major network deploy- m e n t s g l o b a l l y a r e expected from2020. The first commercial 5G s ub s c r i p t i on s i n Europe are expected in 2019, Ericsson said in its semi-annual Mobility Re p o r t . Th e mo b i l e telecom network equip- ment industry is going through a tough period, as demand for 4G and older 2G and 3G network equipment subsides but solid demand for next- generation 5G networks remains a couple of years away. Ericsson, in its report made its first forecast for 2024, sees a total of 8.9 bn mobile subscriptions at the end of 2024, up from 5 bn at the end of this year. The new gener- ation of mobile phone technology is expected to bring higher data speeds and better accommodate a greater variety of con- nected devices. OnePlus announces first R&D facility in India at Hyderabad On e P l u s o u t l i n e d plans for its first R&D f a c i l i t y i n I n d i a a t Hyderabad, which it said will grow to become its biggest such centre glob- ally in three years. The company is hopeful that the facility will play a crucial role in develop- ment of artificial intelli- gence and machine learn- ing in OnePlus products and also drive innova-