BPL Mobile Communications is the oldest mobile service provider in Mumbai circle -- the most competitive of all metros -- and has weathered many a storm during its 13 years of operations.
Undeterred by an ownership tussle (between the Ruias of the Essar Group and UK-based telecom major Vodafone Group), it's business as usual at BPL Mobile with the company charting its expansion plans, rolling out new value-added services, adding subscriber base.
Business Standard caught up with the newly-appointed CEO Sanjeev Chachondia. Excerpts from the interview with Rajesh S Kurup:
What are your immediate priorities for BPL Mobile?
We had invested around Rs 200 crore during the last two years. This has helped in increasing network coverage and capacity, and doubling of switching capacity and base transceiver stations (BTS) to 1,300. We are adding another 500 BTS by the end of this fiscal year.
We have also upgraded our SMS and caller ring back tune platforms, enhanced our channel presence to 15,000 outlets, overhauled our value added service (VAS) platform and launched suite of services as well as BlackBerry handsets.
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The measures are paying off as we have had the highest market share in the previous three months, with net additions ranging at around 27-28 per cent.
BPL Mobile continued to be a Kochi-registered company till recently...?
BPL Mobile had commenced operations on a pan-India basis as a Kochi-registered company in 1995, and continued to do till recently. Now that we are a single circle operator (BPL has sold off other circles except Mumbai to Hutchison Telecommunications International in 2005), we have just completed shifting the registration to Mumbai.
What are the additional investments planned in FY09?
We continue to invest in next generation technologies and platforms, and having spent Rs 200 crore on network up gradation earlier, this year we are making an additional Rs 100 crore investment.
The new investment will help us to support 3 million subscribers, up from the over 1.8 million users in Mumbai. We have also set up 300 additional cell sites through this investment.
Vodafone lawyers, we believe, have accused the Essar group of selling stake in BPL Mobile Communications. Your comments?
The matter is sub judice, hence we would not like to comment on it.
Is BPL Mobile planning to offer BlackBerry services at low rates to take on competitors?
We have no such plans. When it comes to launch of new products and services, we are very customer-focused in our strategy and always work towards offering highest value-to-cost ratio to our customers. BPL Mobile is the only single-circle operator for BlackBerry in the world.
Virgin Mobile and Reliance Communications have reduced call rates to Re 1 for STD and 50 paise per minute for local calls...
We had launched tariffs with such reduced calling rates much ahead of others.
Mobile companies are looking at VAS as a revenue earner as the conventional revenues from voice is depleting...
We were the first operator in the country to introduce a slew of VAS offerings like MMS, caller ring tunes, mobile tracker services, voice SMS and M-commerce.
We have recently launched Mumbai search@cafe (the mobile equivalent to yellow pages) and Mantras@cafe (a suite with over 80 mantras for all occasions) among others.