The cellular party continues

BANGALORE: The cellular segment grew by around 72 percent in terms of revenue and 135 percent in terms of subscribers over the previous year. According to the latest V&D 100 (2003—04), the ninth Indian Telecom Industry Report, the cellular services segment netted revenues of Rs 14,748 crores ($3.2 billion) in FY 2003-04.

Reliance Infocomm made history by registering a subscriber base of 6.9 million subscribers and taking the overall tally of its cellular subscribers to 7.26 million to become the top mobile service provider in terms of subscriber base. In terms of revenue, the top three operators are Bharti Tele-Ventures with Rs 3,261 crore, Hutch with Rs 2,701 crore and Reliance Infocomm with Rs 2,571 crore. BSNL occupied the fourth spot with Rs 1,984 crore.

The fixed access service was badly affected as all the major operators like BSNL and Tata Teleservices were focusing more on mobile services than on fixed services. BSNL and MTNL, the incumbent operators were on the backfoot trying to retain the existing base.

The fixed-access service market was assessed at around Rs 30,164 crore registering a growth of 16 percent. This year the focus was fixed more on selling FWTs (fixed wireless terminals) by private operators like Tata Teleservices and Reliance Infocomm as it was helpful in increasing their ARPUs to a sizable extent. Tata Teleservices was the numero uno player on the FWT front and is doing pretty well.

BSNL and MTNL occupied the top two places in fixed-access services with a subscriber base of 3,63,94,429 and 43,31,153 respectively. Tata Teleservices was a distant third with 666, 955 subscribers.

The long distance services continued their southward journey in terms of revenue. But the negative growth of around 20 percent in FY 2002-03 has slowed down to around 14 percent. There is a strong possibility that long distance will show a positive growth in FY 2004-05 and this will be fueled by connected enterprises and extended enterprises, a trend which is catching up in corporate India. Even broadband will act as a catalyst in this development. The long distance market was pegged at around Rs 9,487 crore ($2.06 billion) of which NLD services contributed around 54 percent.

Both on the NLD as well as ILD front, the focus was more on setting up MPLS networks. On the NLD part, India has a large infrastructure to the tune of 572,675 Rkm. To leverage it service providers have to promote broadband services (triple play). On the international front there is a good growth on the data front where the growth is estimated at around 66 percent. There was a good growth even on international voice minutes by around 22 percent but drop in prices led to downward fall to stabilize at Rs 4,346 crore in FY 2003-04.

In national long distance market, BSNL had 87.7 percent market share while in the international long distance market VSNL occupied almost 63 percent in terms of revenues.