Aircel

» see aircel.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

On 28 February 2018 a mobile operator with more than eighty million customers filed an application at the National Company Law Tribunal in Mumbai asking to be put into insolvency. Not a bank, not a tower company owed money: the operator itself, under Section 10 of the Insolvency and Bankruptcy Code, which exists for precisely that move. The tribunal delivered its order on 12 March and the resolution process began the same day.

Aircel had started in 1999 with a single circle and a founder, Chinnakannan Sivasankaran, who sold the bulk of it to Maxis Communications of Malaysia in 2005. Maxis held 74 percent and Sindya Securities and Investments the remaining 26. Through most of the decade that followed it stayed a regional operator rather than a national one. It led Tamil Nadu and had real weight in Odisha and the North-East circles. Everywhere else it was thin.

The expensive years began in 2010. Aircel paid around 65 billion rupees for third-generation spectrum across thirteen circles when that auction closed in May, then another 34.38 billion in June for broadband wireless spectrum in eight more. It was one of two Indian carriers to launch the iPhone 4 in 2011, and it put 4G into Tamil Nadu and Jammu and Kashmir in August 2014. By December 2017 it was carrying 84.93 million subscribers across 22 circles, against a debt of roughly 16,000 crore rupees.

Aircel sold inside India and nowhere else, so the question this site usually asks, whether a thing ever reached Turkey, gets no purchase on it at all. What carries this far instead is the paperwork, because an Indian insolvency leaves a public file: a signed tribunal order anyone can download, dated to the day, naming the advocates who stood up in the room.

~ the record ~

~ what it cost to be fourth ~

On 14 September 2016 Reliance Communications and Aircel announced that they would fold their mobile businesses into one company, owned half each, with equal board representation. The combined operator would have been India's fourth largest by subscriber base. Shareholders approved it the following April. On 1 October 2017 Reliance let the agreement lapse, and both sides pointed at legal and regulatory obstacles.

That left Aircel holding a balance sheet built for a merger that was not going to happen. Sunil Mittal said in November 2017 that Bharti Airtel was open to acquisition talks, and nothing came of those either. The underlying pressure was not specific to Aircel. Reliance Jio had launched that same September with free voice calls, and every incumbent spent the next two years finding out what its subscriber numbers were actually worth.

~ the sixteen days ~

On 12 February 2018 the Reserve Bank of India issued a circular, numbered RBI/2017-18/131, which withdrew the existing arrangements for restructuring stressed debt, from the corporate debt restructuring scheme through to the strategic debt restructuring one. A single framework replaced them, and it pointed at the insolvency code. Aircel's senior counsel told the tribunal that this circular was the reason the application had to be brought by the company itself. Sixteen days separate the circular from the petition.

~ what the tribunal refused ~

GTL Infrastructure, which leased tower space to Aircel and was owed for it, asked to be joined as an intervener before the Section 10 application was admitted, citing a Delhi High Court decision of 29 January 2018 in its own case. The tribunal framed the question as whether an operational creditor may intervene while the admission of a corporate debtor's own application is being decided, and answered in the negative. GTL was told it could lodge its claim with the appointed resolution professional instead.

The order runs fourteen pages and finishes in two short paragraphs: the petition stood admitted, and the resolution process commenced from the date of the order. M.K. Shrawat, the judicial member who signed it, also directed the promoters and directors not to leave the country without permission. A certified true copy was issued free of cost two days afterward.

~ 776 bytes ~

aircel.com still resolves. Behind it sit 776 bytes of HTML: two images stacked in a table with an old-style image map laid over them, under a title tag reading "Aircel - Moile Service Provider" with the b missing out of mobile. Every clickable region leads to the same place, a directory of insolvency documents.

That directory is the most complete thing left. Request-for-proposal packs for Aircel Limited and for Aircel Cellular and Dishnet Wireless, announcements in English and in Hindi, Form G invitations reissued twice with corrigenda in November 2018, an insolvency update dated 14 February 2019, and four lists of creditors from 17 May 2019 split into financial creditors, employees and workmen, vendors, and distributors. A brand that put its name on Chennai Super Kings shirts and Mahendra Singh Dhoni in its advertising is now a file index maintained by a resolution professional, and that index has been online longer than Aircel ever sold 4G.

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