Title: Instabilities in international joint ventures: a study of the Tata DoCoMo case

Authors: Utpal Chattopadhyay; Pragya Bhawsar

Addresses: National Institute of Industrial Engineering (NITIE), Vihar Lake, Mumbai-400087, India ' National Institute of Industrial Engineering (NITIE), Vihar Lake, Mumbai-400087, India

Abstract: The stupendous growth in India's mobile telephony industry has attracted many foreign operators to invest in India. Japan's telecom giant NTT DoCoMo entered into Indian market through an equity joint venture (JV) with Tata Teleservices, the telecommunication arm of India's biggest business conglomerate, Tata Sons. The Tata DoCoMo joint venture started with a great fanfare by introducing an innovative 'one paisa per second' billing model. But after notable success in the initial years, the venture plunged into a phase of perpetual instabilities when NTT DoCoMo unilaterally desired to exit from the venture by offloading its entire 26% stake to the Indian partner. This paper is an attempt to look afresh into the causes of JV instabilities and to probe, in depth, why the Tata DoCoMo venture has run into rough weather, that too in a period when the telecom industry in India had progressed tremendously in all business dimensions.

Keywords: strategic alliances; international joint ventures; IJVs; telecoms; telecommunications industry; instabilities; innovation; business performance; strategy; Tata DoCoMo; mobile phones; cell phones; India.

DOI: 10.1504/IJEIM.2016.080009

International Journal of Entrepreneurship and Innovation Management, 2016 Vol.20 No.5/6, pp.300 - 319

Received: 08 Mar 2016
Accepted: 27 Mar 2016
Published online: 27 Oct 2016 *

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