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BSNL to spend $1 B on GSM equipment
By siliconindia
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Thursday, 05 February 2004, 20:30 IST
NEW DELHI: State-run Bharat Sanchar Nigam Ltd, India's top telecoms firm by revenue, will buy GSM mobile equipment worth about $1 billion in as many as three years to tap booming demand, its finance director said on Wednesday.
New Delhi-based BSNL, a late entrant in India's flourishing nine-year-old wireless market, has more than 4.9 million GSM mobile users, giving it a 16 per cent share of the market of about 30 million users.
"We've floated a tender of about 11 million GSM lines staggered over two-three years," SD Saxena told reporters on the sidelines of a telecoms seminar.
Saxena said the total project cost would be a minimum of Rs 100 billion ($2.2 billion), with equipment purchases amounting to half that, or around $1 billion.
The firm has a target of 6.5 million GSM users by March 2004 and 11.5 million by March 2005, company officials said.
BSNL began selling mobile services in October 2002 and has since become the number three provider behind Reliance Infocomm Ltd and Bharti Tele-Ventures in India, where less than three in a 100 people own a mobile phone compared with more than 20 in China.
In addition to its customers on GSM, it also provides mobile services to 900,000 customers using the competing CDMA format.
In the past, the company has sourced telecoms equipment from global players such as Motorola Inc, Ericsson and Lucent Technologies Inc.
India is expected to have at least 100 million mobile users by 2005, thanks to strong demand driven by some of the lowest call rates in the world.