Advertisment

Israel seeks JVs with India

author-image
CIOL Bureau
Updated On
New Update

Ariel Atias, Minister of Communication, State of Israel, told Priya Padmanabhan from CyberMedia News in a telephonic interview that many Israeli telecom companies regard Indian as a growing market and a good place to do business with and to expand their business. Excerpts:

Advertisment

What are the main reasons for Israel's excellent performance in the telecom field?

Israelis are highly innovative and have good training in security, research and development. It can be traced to the Research and development in the military space. The Israeli regime is that of open markets. We don’t offer any direct subsidies from the Government.

  Israel is known as a leader in telecom. What is your vision for Telecom in Israel over the next five years?

Advertisment

In the next five years, we will see a lot of fixed-mobile convergence and the introduction of new technologies like WiMax. Israel has a few leading companies in WiMax. –Runcom, Alvarion and a few other companies. The industry’s exports is today valued at $3.3 billion. We believe we can double this figure in five years.

Israel already has a mobile phone penetration of 1.04 per person. Is this an indication that lack of scalability in terms of market and population may adversely affect the prospects of telecom companies in Israel?

While people say the market is highly saturated, it is not saturated in the new services area. Penetration is segments like content services, 3G, MMS, video and so is still very low. There is also a lot of scope in the fixed line services area.

Advertisment

What is your assessment of Israel telecom companies’ performance in India? Which are some of the new companies that are planning to set up their operations in India?

Many Israeli telecom companies regard Indian as a growing market and a good place to do business and to expand their business especially in mobile and also in fixed line because the telecom infrastructure is going to grow in the next two years in India.

What are the areas of bilateral cooperation in the field of telecom between India and Israel?

Advertisment

There is lot of space for cooperation and joint ventures and partnerships between India and Israel. R&D is one of the strong points of Israeli engineers and our companies would look for joint ventures for mass volume production. This can be outsourced to places like Bangalore and other places in India. © CyberMedia News

© CyberMedia News

tech-news