Vodafone purchased Hutchison Telecommunications’ 67 per cent stake in Hutchison Essar for $11.1 billion (Rs 48,540 cr), which values the Hutch Essar at $18.8 billion, including debt.

Hindu Businessline quotes Sunil Mittal of Bharti Airtel saying that the company would up the ante knowing that Vodafone would come hard to grab more market share.

When asked to comment on the Vodafone bid, Mr Mittal said that if he were representing Vodafone, then he would have paid a few billion dollars more to acquire Hutch.

On the other hand, the two giants are also co-operating.

Bharti has signed an infrastructure sharing agreement with Vodafone, which would allow both operators to share nearly 70,000 mobile towers across the country.

Bharti would also be Vodafone’s preferred long distance telephony service provider.

Bharti would make Vodafone its preferred roaming partner.

Business Standard reports that the company is set to introduce low-cost handsets and new value-added services such as mobile payments and money transfers.

Vodafone recently reached the 200-million subscriber mark. The company believes that emerging markets are approximately 60 per cent of the total expected growth in the next five years. The CAGR is 12.3 per cent as compared with 4.4 per cent in developed markets.

Speaking to the media at the 3GSM World Congress 2007, Arun Sarin, CEO, Vodafone mentioned that he wanted Asim Ghosh to retain his position in the company.

He noted that while India boasted of 400 minutes of use per subscriber per month, Europe speaks of 150 minutes and the US of 800 minutes.

The company has already been exploring the mobile advertising and social networking spaces, besides the mobile payments (including money transfers) and mobile TV.

Vodafone already has partnerships towards these ends with the likes of YouTube (videos), MySpace (social networking), Google (search), Yahoo (Instant messaging) and eBay to name a few.

Sarin, however, cautioned that “we need to define common standards. We need to define the size of banner advertisements and video advertisements besides reporting platforms to make mobile advertising a success”.