With its financial performance dwindling due to competition and wage costs, state-run Bharat Sanchar Nigam Ltd is targeting Rs 1,000 crore revenue within a year from infrastructure sharing business. The firm has a huge asset base of more than 40,000 towers across the country.
BSNL is aggressively working towards sharing its passive as well as active infrastructure with existing and new telecom operators. It said the Master Sharing Agreement (MSA) for sharing BSNL towers with some telecom operators is in the final stages and is likely to be finalised soon. In addition, BSNL has also decided to hire infrastructure from various Infrastructure Providers (IPs) to speed up its roll out for mobile network in different states.
BSNL in 2008-09 has posted a net profit of Rs 574.85 crore on a total revenue of Rs 35,811.92 crore. BSNL’s profit has declined during the current financial year on account of increase in cost of employees due to the implementation of pay commission recommendations and a decline in revenue of fixed line services, it said. The PSU is also looking at operators outside India.
BSNL is focusing on increasing its revenues through new Value Added Services. It has recently launched new services such as Movie Download, Video Streaming, Full track music download etc.