Boston Consulting sees consolidation in telecom

 K James V Abraham, vice-president and director of BCG, however, could not give a timeframe within which the consolidation might happen.

 He said, in any other country it would have been easy to give a timeframe but, in India there were a large number of regulatory issues involved and it was also a slow moving market. Abraham was in the city to speak at the Nasscom-organised Infocom 2003.

 BCG is currently working with many telecom companies in areas such as consolidation, churn management and acquisition, long distance bundling and product innovation. Abraham however refused to divulge the names of the companies.

 On the unified licence regime, Abraham said that it was a stop-gap measure and there were more pressing issues in the industry such as intra-circle merger and spectrum allocation.

 He, however, pointed out that with the unified licence these issues were also being sorted out. This was a positive development.

 Among the five players that would survive, Abraham said BSNL will definitely be one of them. He said, in any market the lowest that the incumbent