Norwegian-based Telenor ASA,  the primary shareholder in GrameenPhone in Bangladesh with operations in Pakistan, Malaysia and Thailand, bought a 60% stake in India’s Unitech Wireless at the end of 2008. The deal is expected to be finalized in Q1 of 2009.

Analysts were initally quite critical of the deal, as Unitech has no network to speak of, and Telenor’s stock dipped on the announcement.  However, Unitech Wireless holds licenses for all 22 mobile regions of India–the world’s 2nd biggest market after China–which would appear to be a valuable asset even in a very competitive market. Consider that a few years ago, Telenor spent $1.9 billion to buy a license in Serbia! Coupled with Telenor’s experience and success in South and Southeast Asia, an Indian play of this magnitude makes long-term strategic sense.

Telenor says the deal is contingent on sharing infrastructure, perhaps eyeing the 30,000-50,000 cell towers of its entrenched competitors. While unstated, Telenor is likely looking to the new company Indus Towers, started by Bharti, Vodafone Essar, and Idea Cellular,  to share network assets.

Since the announcement, Telenor has indicated it will not pay shareholder dividends in 2008 or 2009, and will take out a three-year loan to pay for its investment. Telenor’s share price, which lost 64% of its value in 2008, has recovered somewhat in early 2009 trading.

Nokia said recently it had seen no evidence that the global economic downturn was affecting demand for mobile phones in emerging markets, as it outlined plans for new handsets for developing countries, as reported in the Financial Times.

Alex Lambeek, a Nokia vice-president responsible for the Finnish company’s strategy in emerging markets, said 2008 should be the first year in which the number of handsets sold in developing countries to customers replacing their existing mobiles would surpass those to first-time buyers–particularly in India, China and Indonesia.

Asked whether Nokia had seen any evidence of slowing demand in emerging markets because of the economic downturn, Mr Lambeek told the Financial Times: “The simple answer is no. We see a very strong underlying trend of mobility taking root in emerging markets, and the growth drivers for that are still very much in place.”

Mr Lambeek said Nokia was looking at how to tailor its services strategy for emerging markets, and highlighted Wednesday’s announcement that it is linking with Webmail International, a South African telecoms company, to provide email services on its mobiles in the country. He added that Nokia was interested in developing mobile banking services for emerging markets, as well as informamtion services to aid productivity in industries such as agriculture.

Nokia’s emergence as the dominant player in developing markets comes at a time when Motorola’s handset business is ailing, and has been split off from Motorola’s other operations.

One of the key themes of You Can Hear Me Now is that private investment is a better route to poverty eradication than World Bank loans and programs. A new report from the World Bank reaches that same conclusion, as reported in today’s Washington Post.com. Private investment that sparks indigenous entrepreneurship which in turn leads to creation of millions of rural income opportunities is by and large a better way to drive GDP growth than loans to govenments that don’t effectively deploy the funds or distribute the money.

The Bank’s Independent Evaluation Group looked at 25 countries into which the World Bank had poured nearly $10 billion between 2001 and 2005.

“Achievement of sustained increases in per capita income, essential for poverty reduction, continues to elude a considerable number of countries,” the report declared, singling out as particularly ineffective programs aimed at the rural poor. Roughly half of such efforts from 2001 to 2005 “did not lead to satisfactory results.”

Overall, since 1990, the incidence of people living on less than $1 a day has dropped from 28% of the world’s population to 19%. But most of that drop has occured in China, which has experienced the fastest rate of economic growth in human history–and taken virtually no World Bank money. Do you see a pattern here?

What if that $10 billion had been privately invested in local businesses that were productively using the money? Peter Goodman, who wrote the article, concludes:

“Some of the report reads like an amalgam of the sorts of criticisms that have been leveled against the World Bank for years by activists who accuse it of an ideological bias toward market reforms and a callous disregard for the people bearing the brunt of such policies. The report chides the bank for failing to help cushion poor people against price and currency liberalizations; for focusing on the fiscal sustainability of pension systems to the deriment of the poor; for promoting the privatization of power industries without thinking enough about wiring up the indigent.”

The World Bank calls the report “overly bleak.”

The Ministry of Information and Industry reported that China had 443 million subscribers at the end of September ’06, and is adding more than 5 million subscribers a month. This gives China close to 1 in 5 cellphone subscribers worldwide.

Similarly, about 1 in 5 Skype users now come from China, despite the government’s ban on use of Skype Out to connect from a PC to the regular phone network.