A woman walks past a poster of Reliance Industries installed outside the venue of the company's annual general meeting in Mumbai June 7, 2012.

NEW DELHI | Mon Feb 18, 2013 4:55am EST

NEW DELHI (Reuters) - India will allow wireless broadband airwave holders to provide voice services if they pay an additional $306 million, a senior government official said on Monday, a move likely to boost billionaire Mukesh Ambani's Reliance Industries Ltd.

Reliance Industries, controlled by India's richest man, is the only company with nationwide fourth-generation (4G) broadband airwaves. The company re-entered the fiercely competitive sector by buying airwaves in a 2010 auction and has so far invested at least $3.5 billion.

Firms which own the broadband wireless access (BWA) airwaves can provide voice services along with high-speed Internet if they pay a fee of 16.58 billion rupees ($306 million), R. Chandrashekhar, the top bureaucrat at the telecommunications ministry, told reporters.

"There is no restriction on the technology that is being used (to provide voice services)," he said.

A move by Reliance Industries, which is still preparing to launch high-speed 4G Internet services, into the voice market would intensify competition and hurt rivals such as Bharti Airtel Ltd and the Indian unit of Vodafone Group Plc.

Reliance Industries shares extended gains to as much as 1 percent after the news, while shares in Bharti Airtel, the country's top telecommunications carrier, were down nearly 1 percent at 4.20 a.m. ET.

The Telecom Commission, the highest decision-making body within the ministry, approved the move on Monday, but it must to be formally signed off by the Telecommunications Minister, Chandrashekhar said.

Voice accounts for almost 85 percent of Indian carriers' revenues, while data is still at a nascent stage. Data services contribute just about 5-6 percent of the total mobile services revenues as fewer people browse the Internet on phones.

Reliance Industries was not immediately available for a comment.

Separately, the Telecom Commission deferred a plan to bring tower companies under the Unified Licensing regime, which is positive for companies such as Bharti Infratel Ltd.

If brought under the regime, the tower companies would have to pay an annual license fee of 8 percent of their revenue and would be required to cut foreign shareholding to 74 percent.

Currently the companies pay no license fee and a foreign shareholder can own as much as 100 percent of their equity.

($1 = 54.2 Indian rupees)

(Writing by Aradhana Aravindan; Editing by Daniel Magnowski)

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MOSCOW | Thu Dec 27, 2012 2:43pm EST

MOSCOW (Reuters) - The country that oversaw the launch of the world's first artificial satellite hopes to regain some of its former glory with a big boost in space spending announced by Russia on Thursday after a series of failures.

Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev approved a plan to spend 2.1 trillion roubles ($68.71 billion) on developing Russia's space industry from 2013 to 2020, state-run RIA news agency reported.

"The programme will enable our country to effectively participate in forward-looking projects, such as the International Space Station (ISS), the study of the Moon, Mars and other celestial bodies in the solar system," Medvedev was quoted as saying.

Despite the launch by the former Soviet Union of Sputnik 1 in 1957, triggering the Cold War space race, Russia's space programme has suffered a series of humiliating setbacks in the past year.

These have mostly involved unmanned missions such as satellite launches, that industry veterans blame on a decade of crimped budgets and a brain drain.

Russia budgeted about 100 billion roubles ($3.3 billion) for space programmes annually in 2010 and 2011, far less than the yearly average of the amount Medvedev announced, but he said some of the money would come from outside the state budget.

The failure of a workhorse Proton rocket after launch in August caused the multimillion-dollar loss of an Indonesian and a Russian satellite. A similar problem caused the loss of a $265 million communications satellite last year.

Medvedev criticized the state of the industry in August, saying problems were costing Russia prestige and money.

Since the retirement of its space shuttle fleet last year, U.S. space agency NASA has been relying on Russia to take astronauts to the ISS at a cost of $60 million each, and plans to continue until its own new craft is developed in 2017.

($1 = 30.5645 Russian roubles)

(Reporting By Nastassia Astrasheuskaya; Editing by Michael Roddy)

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n">(Reuters) - Winnebago Industries Inc (WGO.N), the largest U.S. motor home maker, said it plans to increase its production in the current quarter to meet the high demand that also helped it report stronger-than-expected first-quarter results.

Shares of the company were up 13 percent at $15.95 at noon on the New York Stock Exchange on Thursday. The stock rose to a year-high of $16.22 earlier.

The company said its motorhome order backlog had more than tripled from a year earlier to 2,118 units as of December 1.

"We have continued to increase our production schedule and have hired additional employees to meet this improved demand during the last two fiscal quarters," Chief Executive Randy Potts said in a statement on Thursday.

Order backlog, which the company defines as orders to be shipped within the next six months, grew for both low- and high-end products, Potts said on a conference call.

Growth in motorhome revenue was on strong demand for the company's new entry-level Class A gasoline offerings, Chief Financial Officer Sarah Nielsen said during the call.

The company's Class A models are conventional motor homes constructed directly on medium- and heavy-duty truck chassis.

Winnebago introduced low-priced models after the recession reduced demand for higher-end motorhomes costing up to $350,000.

Net income rose to $7.4 million, or 26 cents per share, from $1 million, or 4 cents per share, a year earlier. Revenue rose 47 percent to $193.6 million. (link.reuters.com/xav74t0)

Analysts on average had expected earnings of 10 cents per share on revenue of $155.3 million, according to Thomson Reuters I/B/E/S.

(Reporting by Sruthi Ramakrishnan in Bangalore; Editing by Ted Kerr)

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