Search the Internet          Tips  Sites: Finance, Investment

Bharti sees long distance services as cash cow

K Giriprakash

Long distance services will increasingly replace mobile services as a major money earner for the Bharti Group, according to chairman Sunil Mittal.

Bharti's traffic on a daily basis from mobile-to-mobile is around 6.5 million minutes and, according to analysts, total revenues from it on a monthly basis would be around Rs 200 million.

Bharti mops up revenues from local mobile operators who have signed up with Bharti Telesonic to route their calls through Bharti's national long distance network. All the cellular operators recently announced that they had tied up with Bharti's NLD service.

Mittal said the group may raise around Rs 15 billion through debt. "We don't require to raise more than Rs 15 billion even though we can raise up to Rs 30 billion," Mittal said. He said the total equity of the group is around Rs 50 billion and debt of around Rs 20 billion.

Mittal said he was hopeful that revenues from international long distance will be extremely high. "We expect to take a 15 per cent share of the Rs 70 billion international long distance revenues by VSNL," Mittal said.

Mittal said revenues from its mobile service was as high as 85 per cent of its total revenues which is expected to reduce to around 75 per cent during the next year. At the same time, revenues from long distance will significantly go up. Mittal said the group's turnover is expected to double to around Rs 40 billion during 2002-03.

Of its Rs 20 billion revenues during 2001-02, Rs 16 billion came from services which again is expected to double during the current fiscal. Mittal said the total cellular market size is expected to be around 50 million in another five years of which Bharti has targeted 10 million.

Powered by

ALSO READ:
The Rediff Budget Special
The Rediff-Business Standard Special
Money

Tell us what you think of this report