Malaysian tycoon's $7 billion wipeout turns his India dream into nightmare

Bloomberg
March 2, 2018

New Delhi, Mar 2: It was supposed to be the crowning achievement of Malaysian tycoon T Ananda Krishnan's five-decade career.

But his $7 billion bet on mobile carrier Aircel Ltd may instead go down as one of the biggest-ever flops by a foreign investor in India, a stark reminder that doing business in the world's fastest-growing major economy is often a lot tougher than it looks.

Krishnan's holding company stands to lose all the money it poured into Aircel over the past 12 years, people with knowledge of the matter said, after the carrier filed to start bankruptcy proceedings this week. Buffeted by intense competition and regulatory uncertainty, Aircel is the latest in a long list of casualties in an Indian telecom market that only a few years ago was luring foreign entrants in droves.

While international companies have fared much better in India's buoyant consumer products and financial services industries, the turmoil in telecom is unlikely to help Prime Minister Narendra Modi's campaign to lure more foreign capital. In January, his government eased restrictions on foreign direct investment in several sectors, including single brand retail, real estate brokerages and power exchanges.

"India has always been a difficult market, even as it offers the prospects of great demographics and a billion-plus population," Sampath Reddy, chief investment officer at Pune-based Bajaj Allianz Life Insurance Co, said by phone. "The Aircel episode definitely has lessons in the offing for anyone who starts a business in the country."

Krishnan, 79, spent about $800 million to purchase Aircel in 2006, when less than 10 percent of India's 1.1 billion people owned a mobile phone and the scope for growth looked nearly limitless.

By that time, the Harvard Business School graduate had already established himself as one of Malaysia's most powerful billionaires, with controlling stakes in the country's biggest mobile-phone and pay-television operators and close ties to former Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad.

India Allure

Faced with lackluster growth at home, Krishnan saw India's booming market as key to his empire's future. And he was willing to invest big to make Aircel a success.

Over the years, Maxis Communications Bhd, the holding company in which Krishnan owns a 45 percent stake, made about $3.4 billion of shareholder advances to Aircel, one of the people with knowledge of the matter said. Maxis Communications also bought $1.2 billion of common stock and subscribed to $1.6 billion of redeemable preference shares, the person said.

While he had deep pockets, Krishnan failed to anticipate how cutthroat India's telecom market would become. With nearly a dozen players jockeying for market share, call rates in the country plunged to some of the lowest levels worldwide. Competition has only intensified since 2016, when Reliance Jio Infocomm Ltd., owned by India's richest man, stormed into the market and offered free calls.

Aircel made a last-ditch effort to gain scale by attempting a merger with Reliance Communications Ltd. A setback came in January 2017, when India's highest court barred Aircel from selling or leasing its airwaves amid a broader graft lawsuit. The deal eventually collapsed in October last year.

The company summed up its dire situation in a Twitter post on Wednesday announcing the bankruptcy filing, saying Aircel had been "facing troubled times in a highly financially stressed industry, owing to intense competition following the disruptive entry of a new player, legal and regulatory challenges, high level of unsustainable debt and increased losses."

A representative for Maxis Communications declined to comment.

After Aircel, Krishnan is likely to spend more time focusing on his other businesses, which include Malaysian carrier Maxis Bhd. and pay-TV operator Astro Malaysia Holdings Bhd., the person with knowledge of the matter said. Both companies are still profitable, though their stock prices have dropped by an average 10 percent over the past year, versus a 9.6 percent gain in Malaysia’s benchmark equity index, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.

That doesn’t mean Krishnan is giving up on India entirely. He still controls a stake in South Asia FM Ltd., a radio broadcaster, and TV service provider Sun Direct. The businesses are performing well, and Krishnan currently has no plans to sell, the person said.

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Agencies
August 9,2020

When researcher Monica Gandhi began digging deeper into outbreaks of the novel coronavirus, she was struck by the extraordinarily high number of infected people who had no symptoms.

A Boston homeless shelter had 147 infected residents, but 88% had no symptoms even though they shared their living space. A Tyson Foods poultry plant in Springdale, Ark., had 481 infections, and 95% were asymptomatic.

Prisons in Arkansas, North Carolina, Ohio and Virginia counted 3,277 infected people, but 96% were asymptomatic.

During its seven-month global rampage, the coronavirus has claimed more than 700,000 lives. But Gandhi began to think the bigger mystery might be why it has left so many more practically unscathed.

What was it about these asymptomatic people, who lived or worked so closely to others who fell severely ill, she wondered, that protected them? Did the "dose" of their viral exposure make a difference? Was it genetics? Or might some people already have partial resistance to the virus, contrary to our initial understanding?

Efforts to understand the diversity in the illness are finally beginning to yield results, raising hope that the knowledge will help accelerate development of vaccines and therapies - or possibly even create new pathways toward herd immunity in which enough of the population develops a mild version of the virus that they block further spread and the pandemic ends.

"A high rate of asymptomatic infection is a good thing," said Gandhi, an infectious-disease specialist at the University of California at San Francisco. "It's a good thing for the individual and a good thing for society."

The coronavirus has left numerous clues - the uneven transmission in different parts of the world, the mostly mild impact on children. Perhaps most tantalizing is the unusually large proportion of infected people with mild symptoms or none at all. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention last month estimated that rate at about 40%.

Those clues have sent scientists off in different directions: Some are looking into the role of the receptor cells, which the virus uses to infiltrate the body, to better understand the role that age and genetics might play. Others are delving into masks and whether they may filter just enough of the virus so those wearing them had mild cases or no symptoms at all.

The theory that has generated the most excitement in recent weeks is that some people walking among us might already have partial immunity.

When SARS-CoV-2, the technical name of the coronavirus that causes the disease covid-19, was first identified on Dec. 31, 2019, public health officials deemed it a "novel" virus because it was the first time it had been seen in humans who presumably had no immunity from it whatsoever. There's now some very early, tentative evidence suggesting that assumption might have been wrong.

One mind-blowing hypothesis - bolstered by a flurry of recent studies - is that a segment of the world's population may have partial protection thanks to "memory" T cells, the part of our immune system trained to recognize specific invaders. 

This could originate from cross-protection derived from standard childhood vaccinations. Or, as a paper published Tuesday in Science suggested, it could trace back to previous encounters with other coronaviruses, such as those that cause the common cold.

"This might potentially explain why some people seem to fend off the virus and may be less susceptible to becoming severely ill," National Institutes of Health Director Francis Collins remarked in a blog post this past week.

On a population level, such findings, if validated, could be far-reaching.

Hans-Gustaf Ljunggren, a researcher at Sweden's Karolinska Institute, and others have suggested that public immunity to the coronavirus could be significantly higher than what has been suggested by studies. In communities in Barcelona, Boston, Wuhan and other major cities, the proportion of people estimated to have antibodies and therefore presumably be immune has mostly been in the single digits. But if others had partial protection from T cells, that would raise a community's immunity level much higher.

This, Ljunggren said, would be "very good news from a public health perspective."

Some experts have gone so far as to speculate about whether some surprising recent trends in the epidemiology of the coronavirus - the drop in infection rates in Sweden where there have been no widespread lockdowns or mask requirements, or the high rates of infection in Mumbai's poor areas but little serious disease - might be due to preexisting immunity.

Others say it's far too early to draw such conclusions. Anthony Fauci, the United States' top infectious-disease expert, said in an interview that while these ideas are being intensely studied, such theories are premature. He said at least some partial preexisting immunity in some individuals seems a possibility.

And he said the amount of virus someone is exposed to - called the inoculum - "is almost certainly an important and likely factor" based on what we know about other viruses.

But Fauci cautioned that there are multiple likely reasons - including youth and general health - that determine whether a particular individual shrugs off the disease or dies of it. That reinforces the need, in his view, for continued vigilance in social distancing, masking and other precautions.

"There are so many other unknown factors that maybe determine why someone gets an asymptomatic infection," Fauci said. "It's a very difficult problem to pinpoint one thing."

- - -

News headlines have touted the idea based on blood tests that 20% of some New York communities might be immune, 7.3% in Stockholm, 7.1% in Barcelona. Those numbers come from looking at antibodies in people's blood that typically develop after they are exposed to a virus. But scientists believe another part of our immune system - T cells, a type of white blood cell that orchestrates the entire immune system - could be even more important in fighting against the coronavirus.

Recent studies have suggested that antibodies from the coronavirus seem to stick around for two to three months in some people. While work on T cells and the coronavirus is only getting started - testing T cells is much more laborious than antibody testing - previous research has shown that, in general, T cells tend to last years longer.

One of the first peer-reviewed studies on the coronavirus and T cells was published in mid-May in the journal Cell by Alessandro Sette, Shane Crotty and others at the La Jolla Institute for Immunology near San Diego.

The group was researching blood from people who were recovering from coronavirus infections and wanted to compare that to samples from uninfected controls who were donors to a blood bank from 2015 to 2018. The researchers were floored to find that in 40% to 60% of the old samples, the T cells seemed to recognize SARS-CoV-2.

"The virus didn't even exist back then, so to have this immune response was remarkable," Sette said.

Research teams from five other locations reported similar findings. In a study from the Netherlands, T cells reacted to the virus in 20% of the samples. In Germany, 34%. In Singapore, 50%.

The different teams hypothesized this could be due to previous exposure to similar pathogens. Perhaps fortuitously, SARS-CoV-2 is part of a large family of viruses. Two of them - SARS and MERS - are deadly and led to relatively brief and contained outbreaks. Four other coronavirus variants, which cause the common cold, circulate widely each year but typically result in only mild symptoms. Sette calls them the "less-evil cousins of SARS-CoV-2."

This week, Sette and others from the team reported new research in Science providing evidence the T cell responses may derive in part from memory of "common cold" coronaviruses.

"The immune system is basically a memory machine," he said. "It remembers and fights back stronger."

The researchers noted in their paper that the strongest reaction they saw was against the spike proteins that the virus uses to gain access to cells - suggesting that fewer viral copies get past these defenses.

"The current model assumes you are either protected or you are not - that it's a yes or no thing," Sette added. "But if some people have some level of preexisting immunity, that may suggest it's not a switch but more continuous."

- - -

More than 2,300 miles away, at the Mayo Clinic in Cleveland, Andrew Badley was zeroing in the possible protective effects of vaccines.

Teaming up with data experts from Nference, a company that manages their clinical data, he and other scientists looked at records from 137,037 patients treated at the health system to look for relationships between vaccinations and coronavirus infection.

They knew that the vaccine for smallpox, for example, had been shown to protect against measles and whooping cough. Today, a number of existing vaccines are being studied to see whether any might offer cross-protection against SARS-CoV-2.

When SARS-CoV-2, the technical name of the coronavirus that causes the disease covid-19, was first identified on Dec. 31, 2019

The results were intriguing: Seven types of vaccines given one, two or five years in the past were associated with having a lower rate of infection with the new coronavirus. Two vaccines in particular seemed to show stronger links: People who got a pneumonia vaccine in the recent past appeared to have a 28% reduction in coronavirus risk. Those who got polio vaccines had a 43% reduction in risk.

Venky Soundararajan, chief scientific officer of Nference, remembers when he first saw how large the reduction appeared to be, he immediately picked up his phone and called Badley: "I said, 'Is this even possible?'"

The team looked at dozens of other possible explanations for the difference. It adjusted for geographic incidence of the coronavirus, demographics, comorbidities, even whether people had had mammograms or colonoscopies, under the assumption that people who got preventive care might be more apt to social distance. But the risk reduction still remained large.

"This surprised us completely," Soundararajan recalled. "Going in we didn't expect anything or maybe one or two vaccines showing modest levels of protection."

The study is only observational and cannot show a causal link by design, but Mayo researchers are looking at a way to quantify the activity of these vaccines on the coronavirus to serve as a benchmark to the new vaccines being created by companies such as Moderna. If existing vaccines appear as protective as new ones under development, he said, they could change the world's whole vaccine strategy.

- - -

Meanwhile, at NIH headquarters in Bethesda, Md., Alkis Togias has been laser-focused on one group of the mildly affected: children. He wondered whether it might have something to do with the receptor known as ACE2, through which the virus hitchhikes into the body.

In healthy people, the ACE2 receptors perform the important function of keeping blood pressure stable. The novel coronavirus latches itself to ACE2, where it replicates. Pharmaceutical companies are trying to figure out how to minimize the receptors or to trick the virus into attaching itself to a drug so it does not replicate and travel throughout the body.

Was it possible, Togias asked, that children naturally expressed the receptor in a way that makes them less vulnerable to infection?

He said recent papers have produced counterintuitive findings about one subgroup of children - those with a lot of allergies and asthma. The ACE2 receptors in those children were diminished, and when they were exposed to an allergen such as cat hair, the receptors were further reduced. Those findings, combined with data from hospitals showing that asthma did not seem to be a risk factor for the respiratory virus, as expected, have intrigued researchers.

"We are thinking allergic reactions may protect you by down-regulating the receptor," he said. "It's only a theory of course."

Togias, who is in charge of airway biology for the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, is looking at how those receptors seem to be expressed differently as people age, as part of a study of 2,000 U.S. families. By comparing those differences and immune responses within families, they hope to be able to better understand the receptors' role.

Separately, a number of genetic studies show variations in genes associated with ACE2 with people from certain geographic areas, such as Italy and parts of Asia, having distinct mutations. No one knows what significance, if any, these differences have on infection, but it's an active area of discussion in the scientific community.

- - -

Before the pandemic, Gandhi, the University of California researcher, specialized in HIV. But like other infectious-disease experts these days, she has spent many of her waking hours thinking about the coronavirus. And in scrutinizing the data on outbreaks one day, she noticed what might be a pattern: People were wearing masks in the settings with the highest percentage of asymptomatic cases.

The numbers on two cruise ships were especially striking. In the Diamond Princess, where masks weren't used and the virus was likely to have roamed free, 47% of those tested were asymptomatic. But in the Antarctic-bound Argentine cruise ship, where an outbreak hit in mid-March and surgical masks were given to all passengers and N95 masks to the crew, 81% were asymptomatic.

Similarly high rates of asymptomatic infection were documented at a pediatric dialysis unit in Indiana, a seafood plant in Oregon and a hair salon in Missouri, all of which used masks. Gandhi was also intrigued by countries such as Singapore, Vietnam and the Czech Republic that had population-level masking.

"They got cases," she noted, "but fewer deaths."

The scientific literature on viral dose goes back to around 1938 when scientists began to find evidence that being exposed to one copy of a virus is more easily overcome than being exposed to a billion copies. Researchers refer to the infectious dose as ID50 - or the dose at which 50% of the population would become infected.

While scientists do not know what that level might be for the coronavirus (it would be unethical to expose humans in this way), previous work on other nonlethal viruses showed that people tend to get less sick with lower doses and more sick with higher doses. A study published in late May involving hamsters, masks and SARS-CoV-2 found that those given coverings had milder cases than those who did not get them.

In an article published this month in the Journal of General Internal Medicine, Gandhi noted that in some outbreaks early in the pandemic in which most people did not wear masks, 15% of the infected were asymptomatic. But later on, when people began wearing masks, the rate of asymptomatic people was 40% to 45%.

She said the evidence points to masks not just protecting others - as U.S. health officials emphasize - but protecting the wearer as well. Gandhi makes the controversial argument that while people mostly have talked about asymptomatic infections as terrifying due to how people can spread the virus unwittingly, it could end up being a good thing.

"It is an intriguing hypothesis that asymptomatic infection triggering immunity may lead us to get more population-level immunity," Gandhi said. "That itself will limit spread."

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News Network
February 16,2020

Munich, Feb 16: Iran's foreign minister said Saturday that US President Donald Trump is receiving bad advice if he believes an American "maximum pressure" campaign against his country will cause the government in Tehran to collapse.

Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif told a group of top defense officials and diplomats at the Munich Security Conference that the information provided to the president has dissuaded Trump from accepting offers from other leaders to mediate between Washington and Tehran.

"President Trump has been convinced that we are about to collapse so he doesn't want to talk to a collapsing regime," Zarif said.

To support his argument, the Iranian minister cited Trump's decision to pull out unilaterally in 2018 from Iran's nuclear deal with the US and other world powers. Trump said the landmark 2015 accord didn't address Iran's ballistic missile program or regional activities and needed to be renegotiated.

Since then, the Trump administration's re-imposition of US sanctions in a campaign of so-called "maximum pressure" have taken a severe toll on the Iranian economy and sent Iran's currency plunging.

"I believe President Trump, unfortunately, does not have good advisers," Zarif said. "He's been wanting for Iran to collapse since he withdrew from the nuclear deal." Zarif also said the killing of Iranian Gen. Qassem Soleimani in a US drone strike in Iraq on January 3 was a miscalculation by Washington that has galvanized support for Iran instead of increasing pressure on the regime.

The Iran nuclear deal, known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action or JCPOA, promised Iran economic incentives in exchange for curbs on its nuclear program. It was intended to prevent Tehran from developing a nuclear bomb, which Iran insists it does not want to do.

Since the US withdrawal, the deal's other signatories - Germany, France, Britain, Russia and China - have unsuccessfully struggled to come up with ways to offset the effects of the new American sanctions.

Washington has pressured the other countries - so far without success - to abandon the deal entirely US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said at the Munich Security Conference earlier Saturday that while there may be disagreements on what to do with the JCPOA, "when I talk to my counterparts here in Europe, everybody gets it."

"Everyone understands that these are folks who continue to build out their nuclear program," Pompeo said. "So there's a common understanding about the threat; we have tactical differences on how to proceed."

In recent months, Iran has steadily violated the limitations the deal placed on the amount of enriched uranium and heavy water it can stockpile, the number and type of centrifuges it can operate, and the purity of the uranium it enriches.

Iranian officials insist the moves are intended only to put pressure on the countries that remain part of the deal to provide economic help to Iran and that all the measures taken are fully reversible.

Zarif rejected Trump's suggestion of negotiating a new deal, saying the one negotiated during the Obama administration was the only vehicle for talks on Iran's nuclear program.

"There is no point in talking over something you already talked about. You don't buy a horse twice," he said.

"It's not about opening talks with the United States. It's about bringing the United States to the negotiating table that's already there," Zarif said.

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News Network
February 10,2020

New Delhi, Feb 10: Former finance minister P Chidambaram on Monday tore into the Modi government's handling of the economy, saying it was close to collapse and was been attended by "very incompetent doctors."

Initiating the debate on the Union Budget for 2020-21, he said rising unemployment and falling consumption was making India poorer.

The economy, he said, is facing demand constraints and is investment starved. The economy is facing fall in consumption and rising unemployment.

"Fear and uncertainty prevails in the country," he added.

He said the chief economic advisor to the BJP government for four years, Arvind Subramanian has stated that the economy is in the ICU. But "I would say the patient has been kept out of ICU and incompetent doctors are looking at the patient," Chidambaram said.

"It is dangerous to have a patient out of ICU and being looked upon by incompetent doctors. What is the point standing around and chanting slogan 'Sab ka saath, sab ka vishwas'," he said, adding every competent doctor the Modi government could ever identify has left the country.

His said a list of such people included former RBI governor Raghurman Rajan, former CEA Arvind Subramanian, former RBI governor Urjit Patel and former NITI Aayog vice chairman Arvind Panagariya.

"Who are your doctors, I want to know," he said, adding the government considers Congress as untouchable and doesn't think of any good about the rest of the opposition and so doesn't consult them.

Chidambaram charged that instead of putting money in the hands of people, the Modi government "put money in hands of 200 corporates" by way of corporate tax.

He said Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman in her 160- minute budget speech did not talk of the economy and its management.

"You are living in echo chambers. You want to hear your own voice," he said.

Listing problems with the Modi government, Chidambaram said it refuses to admits in mistakes, lives in denial and has predispositions.

The demonetisation of old 1000 and 500 rupee notes, as well as the hurried implementation of the Goods and Services Tax (GST), are "monumental blunders" that ruined the economy, he said, adding the Modi regime is predisposed to protectionism, a 'strong' rupee and is against bilateral and multilateral agreements.

"It is living in denial," he said, adding the economic growth has fallen for hereto unseen six consecutive quarters.

He wondered on the narrative Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman was trying to give after reading out a 160-minute budget speech with few pages left unread.

Her budget neither made any reference to the Economic Survey nor picked up a single idea from it, he said.

Chidambaram, who is credited with presenting a 'dream budget' more than two decades back, said the GDP growth has declined for six consecutive quarters, agriculture is growing by just 2 per cent, while consumer price inflation has risen from 1.9 per cent in January 2019 to 7.4 per cent in a matter of 11 months.

Also, food inflation is at 12.2 per cent. Bank credit is growing 8 per cent with non-food credit rising by 7-8 per cent and credit to industry by just 2.7 per cent. Credit to agriculture has declined from 18.3 per cent to 5.3 per cent and that for MSMEs from 6.7 per cent to 1.6 per cent.

Overall industrial index showed just 0.6 per cent growth. "Every major industry is either near zero or in negative zone," he said, adding thermal power plants are operating at just 55 per cent of the capacity as factories have either closed or are on the verge of closure.

"That gives you a good picture of the state of economy. You don't require MRI," he said. "You are in management for six years. How long can you blame previous managers."

He charged the government with burying unfavourable reports such as the labour survey that put unemployment at 45 -year high of 6.1 per cent at end of 2017-18. Also, consumer expenditure has falling to 3.7 per cent between 2011-12 and 2017-18.

Drilling holes in Budget numbers, he said the 2019-20 budget projected a nominal GDP growth of 12 per cent but ended with just 8.5 per cent. Fiscal deficit was targeted to be shrunk to 3.3 per cent of the GDP but ended by at 3.8 per cent and in the next fiscal it is being targeted at 3.5 per cent.

Revenue deficit was targeted at 2.3 per cent in fiscal ending March 31, 2020 but ended up at 2.4 per cent and in the next it will rise to 2.8 per cent, he said, adding capital expenditure in the next fiscal will shrink to 0.7 per cent from 1.4 per cent in the current.

Net tax revenue in the current fiscal was targeted at Rs 16.49 lakh crore but only Rs 9 lakh crore was collected in first nine months till December 2019 and "you want us to believe this will rise to Rs 15 lakh crore by March 2020," he said.

Similarly, expenditure in 2019-20 was pegged at Rs 27.86 lakh crore but only Rs 11.78 lakh crore spent during April- December and by March this is projected to rise to Rs 27 lakh crore.

"You have no money to spend... and these are masked by numbers," he said. "Numbers are not easily acceptable or believable."

Chidambaram said the government is facing shortfall in all forms of taxes - Rs 1.56 lakh crore on corporate tax, Rs 10,000 crore on personal income tax, Rs 30,000 crore on customs, Rs 52,000 crore on excise and Rs 51,000 crore on GST.

This despite "the extraordinary powers" and "all kinds of power" given to lower level tax officials, he said.

He read of list of heads under which allocation has fallen - food subsidy, agriculture, PM-Kisan, rural roads, mid-day meal scheme, ICDS, skill development, Ayushman Bharat, rural development and MGNEGA.

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