In The Impact of India Inc. on Telecommunications Nick Adamo writes:
"I recently returned from my first ever trip to India, and experienced firsthand the juggernaut that this country has become across most of the major industries in the world..."
Globalisation will shift power eastwards and India is currently best placed to exploit that reality. China will eventually grow companies of sufficient critical mass to give their western counterparts something to think about. I feel the Telecoms sector in general missed its opportunity to subsume the IT sector and so is stuck in a space between infrastructure and applications. Good at the former and aspiring but falling short on the latter. But the Internet is diminishing the value of playing in the infrastructure space; unless you are in the business of helping users migrate from the Telecoms vendors to the internet.
So the Telecoms industry's biggest threat is not the East but the Internet. There was a time when the Telecoms players had the money to buy out the IT industry. If that had happened they would be accelerating the production of mobile apps as we speak. Unfortunately today we have lots of bandwidth and very few interesting applications to exploit it.
Telecoms companies would be wise to hand over the keys if approached by eastern buyers. But I suspect the latter are too smart to fall for that.
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