Nupsout

Uninor is not a Pakistan company.

See the link http://www.indianexpress.com/news/uninor-starts-mobile-services-in-india-call/549731/

Uninor, a Norwegian-Indian joint venture, today became the latest entrant in the country’s highly competitive mobile telephony market, where it would offer GSM services at rates as low as 29 paisa per minute.

Uninor is the first among those who were offered licences last year to launch services. It will be operating in seven circles. “The company has launched operations in Tamil Nadu, Kerala, Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh East and West, and Bihar including Jharkhand,” Telenor Group CEO and President Jon Fredrik Baksaas said.

Uninor is a JV between Norway’s Telenor and India’s Unitech. The network of Uninor will cover a national footprint of close to 600 million subscribers from day one, he said.

Telenor, the world’s sixth-largest mobile services provider, holds 49 percent of the cellular company, known as Uninor, but the stake is set to rise to 67.25 percent.

The venture is part of a strategy by Telenor, which already has operations in such countries as Pakistan, Malaysia and Thailand, to boost its revenues from Asia. Uninor, using the slogan “My time is now” targeting India’s burgeoning youth population, is aiming for an eight percent share of the Indian market by 2018.

“This is a long term venture, not something we can do as a quick fix,” said Jon Fredrik Baksaas, chief executive of Telenor Group.

Telenor joined a clutch of other foreign companies which have teamed up with local partners to tap the Indian market including Britain’s Vodafone, Japan’s NTT DoCoMo and Russia’s Sistema JSFC. Foreign ownership in Indian telecom companies is capped by the government at 74 per cent.