State-run telecom firm Bharat Sanchar Nigam Ltd (BSNL), which is struggling to arrest a slide in growth, has chalked out a strategy to increase its revenues by 10-15 per cent through various measures, including leasing out its real estate space, outsourcing operations and management of its towers and offering enterprise services.
In the next two years, all these segments will contribute about 10-15 per cent to the company’s revenues, R K Upadhyay, chairman and managing director of BSNL, told Business Standard.
Till now, the company was mainly focused on the services segment, which mainly includes mobile and fixedline business. The company will soon issue an expression of interest (EoI) to appoint a consultant for leasing out its space to private companies and the model will be based on a revenue-share arrangement. It will develop commercial space on its vacant plots and has already identified nine plots, Upadhyay said. The project will be executed on a pilot basis and the size is expected to be around Rs 3,000 crore.
The plots identified for the first phase of the project include Mumbai — Borivali (40 acres), Deonar (25 acres) and Santa Cruz (7.5 acres); Kolkata — Maniktala (6,000 sq m); Noida — Sector 18 (3,300 sq m) and Sector 33 (6,000 sq m) and Gurgaon — Sector 18 (6,000 sq m).
Secondly, it will also outsource the operation and management (O&M) of its 70,000 towers across the country. This will also be done on a pilot basis and circle by circle. “We are in advanced stages of discussion for this. The focus will also be on energy savings, while outsourcing O&M of our towers. This will also help us in cutting down our expenditure,” Upadhyay said.
BSNL is also focusing on its enterprise business to corporate customers, where it leases out bulk bandwidth. In April, BSNL had launched internet data centres in six locations across India in partnership with Dimension Data to offer managed co-location and managed hosting and cloud services. It is also based on a revenue-sharing model.
About 49 per cent revenue goes towards staff salary. “We do not have any control over salaries and inflation. So, the focus is now on innovative methods for reducing expenditure and increasing revenues,” Upadhyay said.
For FY11, the company had posted a revenue of Rs 29,687 crore with a loss of about Rs 6,400 crore. BSNL had reported a loss of Rs 1,823 crore for the first time in 2009-10 after its inception in 2000.
