MUMBAI: Vodafone Idea, which is in the middle of launching the largest follow-on-public offer (FPO) later this week, is hopeful of rolling out the much-delayed 5G services over the next six to nine months in select circles.
If sailed through, given the third-largest telco’s poor track record in fundraising since the merger, the Rs 18,000-crore FPO issue, for which it has fixed the price-band at Rs 10-11 (about 15% discount), will be the largest FPO in the history of the domestic capital markets. The previous record was the Rs 15,000-crore issuance from the troubled private sector lender Yes Bank in July 2020.
However, had the Rs 20,000 crore issue from Adani Enterprises sailed through in January 2023, that would have been largest. After the damning Hidenburg report, which alleged a slew of bad practices including price rigging and insider trading in its stocks a few days before the issue was to hit market in the last week of last January, the company had called off the issue day after its successful sale as on the first day after the report the stock tanked 28.5%. Vi also had on record the highest rights issue raising Rs 25,000 crore in 2019, a year after their merger.
“We’ve allocated Rs 5,720 crore from the FPO for the 5G capex to begin with. We are also in active discussion with our lenders for a Rs 25,000 crore loan. We already have raised Rs 2,075 crore from our one of our promoters (Birlas) in the recent rights issue. So, once the funding is there, our effort will be to expedite the ordering as quickly as possible. A lot of groundwork has happened, the trials have happened. After that normally it takes six to nine months for the service roll-out,” chief executive Akshaya Moondra told reporters announcing the FPO that opens Thursday.
On geographical coverage, he said, “we hope to cover 40% of our revenue market with the higher speed 5G network, and from a geographical reach, our focus for 5G and 4G will be limited to our 17 priority circles, which get us 98% of our topline, and 92% for the industry. As of December 2023, Vi had over 223 million users or 19.3% market share in the near-1 billion customer market.
