It may be recalled that in August 2018, Vodafone India and Idea Cellular has announced the merger to create India’s largest telecom company. Under the merger agreement, Idea Cellular was renamed as Vodafone Idea Limited. Now . the telecom operator has announced a brand new identity and is now called ‘VI’ (pronounced as ‘We’).
The announcement was made by the CEO of Vodafone Idea, Ravinder Takkar. On Friday, VI board approved a plan to raise upto Rs 25,000 crores which were a result of supreme court’s announcement which said that the telecom operators have to pay 10% of the total Adjusted Gross Revenue (AGR)-related pending amount and the remaining amount in 10 instalments starting next year. This fundraiser is an important move for Vodafone as it owes Rs 50,000 crores worth of AGR dues.
With this merger, Vodafone now attempts to challenge Jio and Airtel that are already engaging in tariff wars since past few months. “In less than two years time we have achieved the mammoth task of world’s largest integration. As the integration of the two brands is complete, it is time for a fresh start”, said Ravinder Takkar in the announcement that was made through live webcast.
Vodafone has also seen a major loss in consumers since its merger with Idea. Where during the merger they had around 408 million users, VI had around 208 million users by the end of June 2020.
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Vodafone Idea recently also announced some of the new plans to compete with Jio’s and Airtel’s revamped plans. These plans offered a Zee5 subscription worth upto Rs 999 and also the Vodafone Play and Idea Movie service.