Can a business go from being a success case study at Harvard University to one with a not-so-towering future in less than 15 years? It can, if it operates in the Indian telecom sector—that graveyard of empires. Reliance Jio's cut-throat pricing debut in 2016 marked the end game for more than half a dozen telecom operators in the country. The after-effects of that seismic shift are being felt even today. Ask cash-strapped Vodafone Idea (Vi), which keeps flitting between life and death. Or rather, Indus Towers—India's largest telecom-tower company with 187,000 towers and the protagonist of today's story. As luck would have it, Indus Towers’ prospects now depend, to a good extent, on Vi's survival. Vi is not just a key user of Indus’s telecom towers, it is also a key shareholder. If Vi sinks, the telecom-tower company's business will be reduced largely to one client: its largest shareholder Bharti Airtel. This is a far cry from its heydays of 2008, when Indus Towers pioneered the shared-tower-infrastructure model that the world emulated, and of 2017, when it boasted multiple Telcos as clients and its best-ever tenancy ratio. Now, it's not just Vi's fate that should worry the company. Another major pain point is Bharti Airtel seeking out other tower-infrastructure providers. Why did things come to such a pass? Are its key shareholders betraying its cause? How can Indus de-risk itself?
It faces tough choices and tougher hurdles.
