Alva Moya Review

Idea Cellular and Spice Telecom along with Telekom Malaysia (TM) that holds 49% stake in Spice, are yet to work out an amicable arrangement between the deal between the two - Merger or acquisition. While Idea, in which the Birlas own 57% stake, wants to fully acquire Spice, the Modis-promoted company is keen for a merger.

Spice has 2.8 million subscribers, largely high-end, in Punjab and Karnataka circles where Idea is not yet present. Idea, which listed on the bourses in March this year, has grown through the organic as well as the inorganic route in the past. While an acquisition of Spice will give Idea a ready entry into two new circles and a good user base, the Birlas are not willing to pay over the top. Spice is said to be quoting a price of more than a billion dollars for the two-circle operation, to which the Birlas are not agreeing. “We are a fast-growing company and our valuation is definitely higher than a billion dollar,” a Spice executive said. However, going by the fact that promoters of Spice will offload 20% stake in the forthcoming IPO for $150 million, the company’s valuation is $750 million. This remains a bone of contention between the two sides. Idea will continue to be an AV Birla group company going forward and there was no question of the company diluting its identity in a merger. Also, a buy-out of Idea by Spice seems unlikely because Idea is seven times bigger than Spice. AV Birla group officials have earlier said the group will not dilute its stake in Idea below 51%.

Meanwhile, TM has clearly said that it will not exit the Indian market, TM bought 49% stake in Spice in March last year for $179 million. Spice applied for spectrum in 20 circles in September last year. It has already received the DoT nod for NLD and ILD operations. It is too early for the deal to come through as Spice was working on its IPO ahead of any agreement. Sebi has given its approval to the public offering. “We should be opening in the end of June. However, an acquisition after the listing of Spice will become more complicated due to regulatory issues. For the year 2006, Spice recorded revenue of Rs 533.78 crore and EBITDA of Rs 107.86 crore. Its EBITDA margin fell from 23.8% to 20.2% at the end of 2006. The company’s capital expenditure at the end of last year totalled Rs 269 crore.http://telecomsector.blogspot.com/atom.xml

One thing about Bing Crosby as a film performer is that while he didn’t make the very best musicals, he was probably the very best at a particular kind of number that everybody tried to do. I’m talking about the “clowning around” number, where the leads act all goofy, mug a lot and do silly business while singing a silly song. Crosby has one of these in almost every movie he did, and he’s very good at them. He was good at making lines and business seem spontaneous, even if they weren’t, and at getting a “live” feeling into the very canned process of shooting a movie musical number.

A lot of performers had a fondness for this type of number but rarely did it well; Gene Kelly is an example of a guy who always had to have a three-minute mugging/clowning scene that almost always is a low point in the movie (like “By Strauss” in An American In Paris — though the “Moses Supposes” number in Singin’ in the Rain actually does work). The Rat Pack types always tried to do this kind of thing in their movies, and it was usually not very good — but Sinatra did pull it off when he clowned through “Well, Did You Evah!” with Crosby in High Society. Bing was just good at this kind of thing.

Here he is with Jane Wyman in Just For You, in the movie’s big number “Zing a Little Zong.” The song and the number are obviously an attempt to repeat the success of the Crosby-Wyman duet “In the Cool, Cool, Cool of the Evening” from Here Comes the Groom, but Crosby and Wyman seem like they’re having fun, and the tune is another one of those insidious Harry Warren tunes that you can never get out of your brain.

Incidentally, Jane Wyman is an example of how little a movie actor is helped by being able to sing. In the theatre, a good actor who can also sing is extremely valuable and has an expanded range of options, because it means that he or she can do straight plays and also do musicals. But movie musicals were for the most part built around specifically musical performers, who didn’t usually do non-musical films. So it was pretty rare for someone to go back and forth between musicals and non-musicals, as they would in New York.

This meant that once a musical performer’s non-musical career started to take off, he or she would start to phase out musicals almost entirely (Irene Dunne, for example, made very few musicals after the mid-to-late ’30s). So though Jane Wyman could sing, she didn’t usually; she built herself up to a star in non-musical films, then did a few musicals in the early ’50s, and then went straight back into doing exclusively non-musicals. Strict separation.

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