HIGHLIGHTS-Speakers at the World Economic Forum in India

NEW DELHI - The following are excerpts from what was said by participants on the second day of the World Economic Forum meeting in India's capital on Monday. For more stories from the event, click: MANOJ KOHLI, CEO, BHARTI AIRTEL: ON INDIA'S TELECOM PRICE WAR: "This price situation, we believe, is a short-term situation because new operators and present loss-making operators may not be able to continue with this kind of low price." "Price per minute today is going down, but we are ensuring that the cost per minute also goes down." "We are doing very well, we are gaining more revenue market share. I think that is more important to us. (Subscriber) numbers are less important, revenue is more important." "ARPUs will come down as we dig deeper into the lower strata of the society, more and more villages ARPUs will come down. But our model is not an ARPU model. Our model is per-minute revenue, per-minute cost and per-minute margin model." "I can say that the objective is to sustain our per-minute margins." RAVI VENKATESAN, CHAIRMAN, MICROSOFT INDIA: Windows 7 is seeing "very very very good early response" in India. India and China contribute a small portion of Microsoft's global revenue, but are seeing "good double-digit" growth. ON THE INDIAN MARKET: "On one hand, there is very high piracy. On the other hand there is little usage of technology." TEJEPREET CHOPRA, GENERAL ELECTRIC CEO FOR INDIA, BANGLADESH AND SRI LANKA: ON WITHDRAWAL OF STIMULUS: "It's a fine balancing act for the long-term stability of the economy to ensure that you don't create an asset bubble and at the same time we don't want inflation to go up too high. So it's a balancing act governments and central banks need to do." ON GOVERNMENT POLICY AND REFORMS: "I do believe that the government has done a great job on reforms. I think the speed at which the government moved in the fourth quarter of last calendar year in terms of monetary side and on the fiscal policy side were significant, and the speed at which they moved was very credible." "One of the reason why we in India have been able to weather the economic downturn very well is because of the rapid move of the government." RAHUL BAJAJ, CHAIRMAN, BAJAJ AUTO: ON DEMAND IN INDIA: "From September 2009 it started picking up for all sectors of the automobile industry." "My company's motorcycle sales in October, which were a little exceptional ... our company's sales of motorcylces totalled, as compared to the period in October 2008, were up by 50 percent, so obviously demand is doing very well for our sector." (Reporting by Devidutta Tripathy, C.J. Kuncheria and Rajesh Kumar Singh; Editing by John Mair) (([e-mail]; [phone]; Reuters Messaging: [e-mail])) Keywords: INDIA ECONOMY/FORUM (If you have a query or comment on this story, send an email to [e-mail]) COPYRIGHT Copyright Thomson Reuters 2009. All rights reserved.

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