BSNL
Telecom Lead India: The State-run mobile service provider BSNL has posted 8 percent decrease in revenue to Rs 29,688 crore in 2010-11 against Rs 32,045 crore in the previous fiscal, according to results posted on BSNL's website.
Capital expenditure for cellular during the period was Rs. 8138 crore.
The company's net loss has gone up to Rs 6,384 crore in 2010-11 from Rs 1,822 crore in 2009-10. Loss before tax was Rs 6,578 crore in 2010-11 as compared with Rs 2,197 crore. Decline in revenue and increasing expenditure resulted in losses for BSNL.
Income from services was Rs 27,044 crore in 2010-11 against Rs 27,913 crore.
BSNL is taking several steps to reduce its losses and to improve its financial performance. The new steps include: optimizing CAPEX and OPEX through convergence and consolidation of infrastructure; strengthening of stable revenue streams through concerted focus on broadband and enterprise business with major focus on government projects; focusing on the revenue from top 100 cities for monitoring purpose; sustained operational focus on customer care, service delivery, service assurance, revenue management and asset management; aggressive push on data usage and value added services; clear cut segregation of commercial activities from social obligation to ensure sustainable growth and progressive migration of current network to next generation network thereby ensuring convergence, consolidation and seamless delivery of various services to end customers across different technologies.
To revive the business of loss-making state owned telco, TRAI has recently recommended a subsidy of Rs 600 crore to BSNL, which would help the teleco in maintaining rural wireline connections installed before April 1, 2002.
In India, rural wireline subscription is constantly plunging. It dipped by 1 percent in January taking the total rural wireline base to 7.67 million, whereas rural wireless subscription is increasing at a healthy rate. In January, rural wireless subscriber base stood at 312.62 million at 1.64 percent monthly growth.
BSNL has urged the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) to waive 3G spectrum usage charge for a few years in order to become more competitive in the market place.
BSNL suggested that the focus of TRAI should be to protect the interest of operators in addition to protecting the interest of consumers. Almost all operators are on the negative growth of profitability. The revenue accrued from 3G services is yet to match the cost of capital of the 3G spectrum fees.
