It is no secret that ever since its foray into telecom services business, Reliance Communications considers Bharti Airtel as its number 1 competitor and is always on lookout to challenge the market leader.

When Reliance announced its 50 paise flat call rate plan recently, one would have expected that the plan to force Bharti Airtel and others into following the plan.

But RCom’s announcement of the plan intentionally or unintentionally caused a much bigger damage to Bharti Airtel. RCom’s move triggered a sharp dip in share prices of telcos in the exchanges.

Even though Bharti Airtel made it clear that it won’t follow RCom’s pricing model, it failed to diffuse investor apprehensions leading to Bharti Airtel’s share prices declining by almost 10 % for two consecutive dyas. Over the whole of last week, Bharti Airtel witnessed erosion of Rs 35,000 crore in its market valuation. RCom meanwhile witnessed its valuation dwindling by 21 % over last week at Rs 14,169 crore.

Eight listed telcos collectively lost Rs 54,000 crore last week as TRAI’s proposed move to make per second billing mandatory compounded investor concerns.

Idea lost Rs 3534 crore with share price sliding by 15 % over the whole of last week. MTNL lost Rs 522 crore,  Tata Teleservices Maharashtra Rs 531 crore, Tata Communication Rs 370 crore, Spice Communication Rs 227 crore and HFCL Infotel Rs 35 crore.