Bharat Elect, British Firm To Join Hands For Paging Service

The public sector Bharat Electronics (BEL) is firming up a joint venture with Multitone of the UK to offer closed user group (CUG) paging services for the first time in the country.

The venture will offer two-way alpha-numeric pagers to hospitals, industrial plants and similar users where a large number of people will have to be kept in touch over a small area.

All the existing paging services are wide area networked and the pagers one-way. A BEL source said the companys service would be cost-effective compared with a wide area pager.

Confirming that the project was on, a BEL spokesman said the cost, technology and other details were not yet known and the deal with Multitone was yet to be concluded. The Department of Telecommunications (DoT) has projected a 10-fold increase in pager usage within the next four years. With consumers have been slow in taking to pagers, mainly due to the high cost, firms offering these services are finding it difficult to meet their business targets.

The 1997-98 budget has sought to reduce the import duty on pagers. This is expected to push up the market.

The BEL source maintained that the CUG paging service besides being cheaper the wide area paging service, its utility would be much higher due to its two-way communication system. The venture will seek a licence from the DoT after the deal with Multitone is through.

Meanwhile, Bharat Electronics has posted a turnover of Rs 1,226 crore for 1996-97, recording a 15 per cent growth over the previous year.

The profit before tax was Rs 65 crore. A joint venture with Dutch firm Bedelft to manufacture speciality components notched up Rs 45 crore exports.

BEL has product-specific ventures with several foreign firms for speciality defence electronics that go into radars.