NEW DELHI: Activity was seen in just one small city – Bareilly – and there was virtually no bidding on the 30^th day in the FM Phase III e-auctions with the cumulative winning price at the end of the 120^th round rising by just Rs 20 lakh to Rs 1156.8 crore.

Clearly, the bids for all the big cities appear to be over and it is the smaller 31 cities that have so far got bids of Rs 1 to Rs 9 crore that will call the shots.

The number of channels remained the same as yesterday - 97 channels in 56 cities, but the bids took the cumulative reserve price up to by Rs 696.8 crore or 151.5 per cent against the aggregate reserve price of about Rs 459.8 crore.

The cumulative provisional winning price has thus risen over the total reserve price of the first batch of 135 FM channels in 69 existing cities - Rs 550.18 crore – by Rs 606.6 crore or 110.2 per cent.  

Cities expected to enter the Rs ten crore club in the next few days appear to be Jodhpur, Kanpur, Rajkot, Amritsar, Madurai, and Aurangabad which have all got above Rs six crore each.

One channel in Guwahati had fetched a price of Rs 4, 11, 11,243 against its reserve price of just Rs 37 lakh, registering a rise of almost of 980 per cent. A few days earlier, Bhubaneswar had also set a record with a single channel getting the most competitive bidding increment-wise (Rs 7,40,13,559) by going up nine times the reserve price.  

The Percentage Price Increment applicable for the Next Clock Round rose to five in Bareilly which had a bid of Rs 47,23,425. It remained nil in the other cities.

The winning price has risen by more than 100 per cent above their respective reserve prices in Ahmedabad, Amritsar, Aurangabad, Bengaluru, Bhubaneshwar, Chennai, Delhi, Guwahati, Jaipur, Jodhpur, Kolhapur, Mumbai, Nashik, Patna, Pune, Rourkela and Varanasi, all of which got provisional winning bidders at prices more than double the respective reserve prices.

The provisional winning price in the top three cities reflected no change: Delhi – Rs 1,69,16,89,481 (for just one channel); Mumbai – Rs 1,22,81,31,349 (for two channels); and Bengaluru - Rs 1,09,25,45,545. In other cities having got bids of more than Rs ten crore, Chennai - Rs 53,38,83,479; Ahmedabad at Rs 42,68,76,267, Pune at Rs 42,03,50,268; Jaipur – Rs 28,34,98,387; Chandigarh at Rs 19,04,72,374; Hyderabad at Rs 18,00,00,000, Patna – Rs 17,89,83,876, Varanasi at Rs 17,49,18,947, Cochin - Rs 15,04,83,548, Nasik - Rs 14,66,24,270; Lucknow - Rs 14,00,55,000; and Jodhpur at Rs 11,44,39,124 continue to be static.

The e-auction will now recommence on Monday, 7 September.

The following Table summarises 30 days of bidding:

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