BSNL in JV to make 2m CDMA phones

The government-owned Bharat Sanchar Nigam Ltd (BSNL) plans to make one million each of mobile and fixed wireless phones based on Code Division Multiple Access technology.

These would be made exclusively through a joint venture with a foreign company, a BSNL official said Monday.

The country's bigngest telephony company has invited expression-of-interest from global firms to design and produce these telecom products at any of its plants in Mumbai, Kolkata and Jabalpur in Madhya Pradesh, the official told Crisil MarketWire.

"The expression-of-interest has opened on Aug. 27 and will close on Sep. 28," he said.

The new telecom products would be marketed under the BSNL brand name. Currently, BSNL has about 1.4 million CDMA subscribers. Of this, 650,000 are mobile subscribers. The rest belong to the fixed wireless segment.

The foreign partner would have to provide technology to set up facilities for manufacture or assembly and testing of these telecom products within a six-month period.

"The foreign company will bring in the technology and machines while we will provide the manpower and infrastructure," the official said.

The foreign manufacturer would be free to sell these items in the domestic market or export them after meeting BSNL's two million phone-requirement.

Our Economy Bureau adds: Meanwhile, mobile subscriber base in the country grew over 4 per cent in August from that in the previous month.

The growth in Global System for Mobile (GSM) users was 4.62 per cent, while CDMA-based (Code Division Multiple Access) digital mobile subscribers were up 3 per cent in the same period.

State-owned Bharat Sanchar Nigam Ltd (BSNL) added a record 6,28,000 subscribers in one month, the highest-ever monthly addition by a company since the inception of mobile telephony. With a marginal gain in market share, BSNL accounted for 21.46 per cent of the cellular market in the country.