Tag Archives: investment
Perception is reality in investment decisions
Bangladesh is on the cusp of transformative change. No certainty. It could miss the bus. Because of years of work on family planning, child health and womens’ education, its fertility rates are declining and the country is just entering the golden period in terms of demography: declining child dependency; increases in elderly dependency not yet [...]
Nationalizations are back: Libyans in Zambia now, but who is next?
Sounds so 1960s, but . . . This should change investment risk calculations, in Africa for now. But how broad will the ripples run? The Zambian government has confirmed expectations and will renationalise the local mobile network, Zamtel, which is 75% owned by Lybia’s Lap Green Networks. The government has also dissolved the board of [...]
License renewal and Digital Bangladesh
An op-ed written by Harsha de Silva, LIRNEasia’s consultant lead economist, has been published in the Daily Star in Bangladesh. Harsha emphasizes the need to ensure that an environment is created to encourage investment by the private sector to build on the success of delivering voice connectivity on wireless to take broadband to the people [...]
Doing telecom business in China
Talk about coincidence. Just yesterday, on the train to Brussels, I just finished answering a series of questions sent by Voice & Data, the leading ICT industry publication in South Asia. This included a question on whether it would be possible for Indian telcos to do business in China. My answer was “China is a [...]
Profits and investment
In most countries in the early stages of liberalization, I get asked about the profits operators make and how they should be monitored. I tend to say that the priority should be on monitoring investments (not committed, but actually made) and that it’s not a bad idea for the regulator to have some knowledge about [...]
Sri Lanka’s telecom sector to be a smaller part of overall FDI flows
Part of what Boards of Investment do is spin. According to the Chairman of the Sri Lanka BOI, telecom and power sector contributions will go down because tourism investments will increase, not because they are going down in absolute terms. “In the past telecoms and power sector contributed around 60 percent of FDI, while 40 [...]
News generated at the LIRNEasia@5 conference
We didn’t quite think we’d be generating news at the conference, but apparently some of what was said was truly newsworthy. Capital investment in Sri Lanka’s telecom infrastructure has plummeted amid a price war and high taxation which will crimp expansion in the future and broadband roll out in the island, top telecom operators said. [...]
Expropriation makes a comeback in Russia, with a twist
Glimmerings of a return to the bad old days, when governments “nationalized” telecom companies. The end result was pillage by the government flunkies and bad/no service to the public. The Russians are back in this game, but this time through the courts and with a different beneficiary, the local partner oligarch. Already jittery investors were [...]
Another telecenter story. Or will the ending be different because it’s Google’s?
The world is awash in telecenter pilots. I thought all the lessons that could be learned, have been learned. Apparently not. Google is bankrolling another pilot in Kenya, including a USD 700/month broadband bill. So, for sustainability we’d need around 700 users spending a tad more than USD 2 per visit? And that would be [...]
What should we fear, the exaflood or the data drought?
In all networks, there is a perpetual debate about the growth of whatever flows across it (data, voice telephony, traffic. electricity) and what levels of investment are most appropriate for carrying the future load without deterioration of quality. This debate is going on now, about the Internet and the load likely to be placed on [...]
Sri Lanka telecom FDI: Is this the high point?
Meeting the traget of a billion dollars of FDI in 2008 seems to rest on foreign investment continuing at a high rate in telecom. After all, in the first half of the year, telecom brought in USD 291 million, out of a total of USD 425. However, the increasing hostility to the sector driven by [...]
Telecom operators continue to dominate FDI inflows
Contrary to jingoistic claims that foreign owned telcos draining out local resources, the telecom sector continues to bring in new investment from outside. In Pakistan, at one point, 50% of the FDI was telecom. If the breakdown is provided, it may well be that the telecom sector accounts for 50% of FDI in Sri Lanka [...]
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