The Hindu : Reliance Infocomm to focus on Netway

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Thursday, Apr 24, 2003

Business

Business

Reliance Infocomm to focus on Netway

By Our Staff Correspondent

MUMBAI APRIL 23. Anil D. Ambani, Vice Chairman and Managing Director, RIL, said, Reliance Infocomm would break-even in a year. "There is no huge financial impact and as a stand-alone, Infocomm is in a strong position and has already touched the one million subscriber mark in less than 100 days," he said.

The company's capex plan for Infocomm is Rs. 18,000 crores of which Rs. 9,000 crores has already been spent, according to Prakash Bajpai, President, Reliance Infocomm. Reliance Mobile has already covered 673 towns and 97 cities. "Next, we will concentrate on Netway enterprise revolution and provide networking to 194 cities and connect five lakh enterprise locations and continue further to reach the home".

"We are getting ready to launch the pre-paid schemes which constitute 70 per cent of the market. We have interconnect agreement in place and will have it with all operators by end-April," said Mr. Bajpai. He also said that the future plan was to target the large pre-paid market and to offer a new range of handsets. Reliance's GSM operations are spread across 15 States and cover five lakh subscribers or about 50 per cent of the market. The company has two data centres in Bangalore and Mumbai covering 55,000 sq. ft. These would be augmented to cover 1.40 lakh sq. ft.

Responding to a query regarding contributions of the segments to RIL's turnover in future, Mr. Ambani said, in future, 10-15 per cent of the revenue could come from E&P and refining and marketing (upstream and downstream) would account for 50 per cent of the energy business portfolio in the next five years.

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