Vodafone to buy out Hutchison Essar?
According to the BBC, Vodafone has confirmed that it is considering a bid for a majority stake in Hutchison Whampoa’s Indian mobile phone business. Vodafone is expected to offer as much as $13.5bn (£6.9bn) for Hutchison Essar. This overture is consistent with Vodafone’s strategy of expanding in fast-moving markets to offset slow European growth. Whether it will be successful or not remains to be seen.
The BBC release went on to say that Vodafone already owns 10% of Bharti Airtel, the market leader in India, but is keen to build a more substantial presence in the world’s fastest growing telecoms market. Hutchison revealed that several other companies have expressed similar interest.
Foreign firms are limited to owning 74% of Indian mobile phone providers.
Is Trade Imbalance Ubiquitous? — And What about India?
On not so grand a scale as in the USA, Nepal reports imports rising 24% against a 14% increase in exports for the first 8 months of the Nepali fiscal year. This further widens a trade gap that for the current fiscal year has matched 43.3 billion rupees (1.68 billion) in exports against 114 billion rupees ($618 million) in imports.
The People’s Daily Online said, “According to the statistics of NRB, the country’s trade deficit touched 74.16 billion Nepali rupees (1.06 billion U.S. dollars), while it was 54.10 billion Nepali rupees (772.86 million US dollars) during the same period of the previous fiscal year.”
And What about India?
The International Herald Tribune reports that India has enjoyed a 9.3% economic growth rate over the first quarter of 2006, comparing well to China’s estimated 10%. Perhaps surprisingly, significant increase is attributed to agricultural growth (2.9 to 5.3).
