Indian telecom revenues up 21 p.c.

Indian telecom revenues up 21 p.c.

Around 59 per cent of the telecom services revenue came from cellular business

Tuesday, July 01, 2008

Email This

Print This

Comments

RSS

NEW DELHI: The Indian telecom services industry revenues grew by 21.3 per cent to touch Rs. 130,561 crore in 2007-'08, as it its subscriber base increased by 66 per cent to add 100 million new subscribers, a survey revealed.

According to the 13th annual survey of the telecom industry by CyberMedia's Voice&Data, the revenues of cellular, fixed line, National Long Distance (NLD), International Long Distance (ILD), Broadband, VSAT and radio trunking were added to calculate the size of the Indian telecom services industry.

Cellular revenue contributed a major chunk of telecom services revenue followed by fixed line and ILD.

The survey found that around 59 per cent of the telecom services revenue came from cellular business that touched Rs. 76,608 crore in FY 2007-08. This represents a growth of over 36.4 per cent over Rs. 56,183 crore earned in the previous year.

Significantly, the majority of new subscribers are now coming from towns and villages with populations of less than 20,000. The mobile network now covers over half of the nearly 6,00,000 towns and villages.

The mobile services can now be bought from nearly a million outlets—a number that far exceeds the number of FMCG or even the postal outlets.

Expansion into rural areas, lowering entry price of owning a handset through attractive offers and customer retention efforts helped ramp up subscriber-base and revenues.

Fixed line revenues drop

The second biggest contributor to the telecom services business was the fixed line contributing 20.4 per cent to the entire services business. The fixed line business, however, recorded a decline of 11.6% to Rs. 26,692 crore in FY 2007-`08 from Rs. 30,190 crore in FY 2006-`07.

ILD, on the other hand, contributed around 8.8 per cent of the telecom services to touch revenues of Rs. 11,532 crore in the last financial year, up from Rs. 11,506 crore in FY 2006-`07.

NLD segment grew at 35.4 per cent to contribute about 7.5 per cent to the telecom services business with revenue of Rs. 9,732 crore in FY 2007-`08 up from Rs. 7,186 crore in FY 2006-`07.

Broadband bullish

Broadband showed a phenomenal growth of 162.7 per cent to touch the revenue of Rs. 5,359 crore in FY 2007-`08 from Rs. 2,040 crore in FY 2006-`07.

Though the revenue from broadband saw a robust growth, this is not true for the subscriber base. The subscriber base grew from 2.5 mn in FY 2006-`07 to 3.9 mn in FY 2007-`08.

VSAT and Radio Trunking together contributed 0.5 per cent to the telecom services revenue.

A booming economy, easing of entry barriers to mobile access and lowering of tariffs fuelled the growth in a year when the country added over 104 million new subscribers making India the second fastest growing telecom market in the world, the survey said.

Recent government policies aimed at creating affordable connectivity for common man across the country also served as a catalyst.

Commenting on the telecom revolution in the country, Prasanto K Roy, chief editor of CyberMedia's business publications, said, "With India's telecom tariffs still the lowest in the world, there's enormous and sustained growth beyond the metros. So telcos see huge opportunity in the two-thirds of Indians still untouched by the mobile phone revolution. They need to keep leveraging SMS, data, and other value added services, and finding other innovative ways of remaining profitable despite the low and falling ARPU (average revenue per user)."

"The year ahead needs to see some pending issues settled for telecom: such as the introduction of 3G and number portability in the mobile arena, and the abysmally low broadband penetration, in the fixed-line space," Roy added.

More Indians say 'Hello'

The total wireless subscribers (GSM, CDMA and WLL) base stood at around 261 mn by the end of FY 2007-`08. The wireless teledensity is now at more than 22 per cent, which contributes a large chunk to the overall teledensity of over 25 per cent.

The Top 10 by revenue

The top five players in FY 2006-`07 retained their positions in the year under review. Even with a 12.1 per cent decline in revenues, BSNL hung on to its No. 1 position with revenue of Rs. 35,296 crore.

Bharti Airtel with revenue of Rs. 26,436 crore is at the second spot. Reliance Communications and Vodafone with revenue of Rs. 18,638 crore and Rs. 15,477 crore are at No 3 and 4 respectively. Tata Communications came fifth with a revenue of Rs 8,857 crore.

Idea Cellular has moved to No.6 in FY 2007-08 from No. 8 in FY 2006-07 with revenue of Rs. 6,720 crore. Tata Teleservices has come down to No 7 and MTNL slipped 7th position in 2006-07 to No 8.

The top 5 players based on cellular subscriber base were Bharti (62 million), Reliance (46 million), Vodafone (44 million), BSNL (41 million) and Idea cellular (24 million), the survey added.

©CyberMedia News

Email This

Print This

Comments

RSS

Toon porn star 'Savita bhabhi' under fire

Not Airtel, but Apple decides iPhone prices

Indians on par with US s/w developers

iPhone is 'over priced' in India

India to get 3G iPhone with bugs

Toon porn star Savita Bhabhi in police radar

India among top 10 spam sending countries

Apple iPhone 3G makes its India debut

iPhone and gPhone shake up wireless world

India set to receive 3G iPhone

	TAM: Freedom from password management
	Try visual studio 2008. It’s Free
	Privacy on air:Explore now

	Motorola : Good Mobile Messaging
	Smart Enterprises = Smart CIOs
	Business Stability & Reliability with IBM

	Mahindra Connect benefits from SharePoint Server 2007
	Solving the "lost data" problem
	Wipro meets its future demands through E-Cube

	HP Business Availability Center
	Transforming Business
	Aligning IT and Business