The Hindu : Bharti Tele to go for U.S. listing

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Friday, Jul 25, 2003

Business

Business

Bharti Tele to go for U.S. listing

By Our Staff Correspondent

CHENNAI JULY 24. Bharti Tele-Ventures is planning to go in for a listing on the U.S. stock exchanges to step up participation from foreign financial institutions and companies. The funds raised through the proposed overseas listing will primarily be used for consolidation of its business and also for possible financing of acquisitions.

The overseas listing will take place in the next financial year, according to Sunil B. Mittal, Chairman and Managing Director, Bharti Enterprises. Addressing a press conference here today, Mr. Mittal, however, said Bharti had enough internal accruals to meet the normal capital expenditure. He said the company had drawn up a Rs. 2,000-crore investment programme for the current financial year. Out of this, nearly 65 per cent would go to the mobile telecommunication segment and the balance to fixed line and ISD networks. He hinted that Bharti would maintain this investment level in the subsequent years as well.

Answering a volley of questions, Mr. Mittal said the company had put on hold its plan to lay a second undersea cable line between Bombay-Singapore. The second cable, it was felt, was not necessary and in the current market environment where consumers called the shot. The current cable link — between Chennai and Singapore — he felt, was sufficient to meet the existing bandwidth need and any further future demand as well.

Referring to the price war among the telecom players, Mr. Mittal hoped that there would be stability in the marketplace by March 2004. He felt that only four players would remain in the end. He said the price war among the telecom operators would inevitably come to a halt. He presaged a unified national tariff structure among the players across the country sooner than later. Mr Mittal said nearly 65 per cent of Bharti's revenue came from the mobile business and the balance from others.

Network centre in Chennai

<167,1p,1>Mr. Mittal was here to inaugurate Bharti Telesonic's Network Operations Centre (NOC). The Chennai NOC was a mirror of NOC in Delhi ensuring an uninterrupted network. Bharti had invested Rs. 1,400 crores in building a high capacity, fully redundant multi-ring network in India. The Chennai NOC, he said, would centrally monitor, manage and control the 23,000 km fibre optic national long distance network spread across the country. After Delhi, he said, Chennai centre was significant to Bharti from its strategic location point of view, as Bharti's domestic infrastructure was inter-connecting with Network i2i's high capacity submarine cable system for Singapore. This provided Bharti international connectivity to the world with high speed and quality of service. In addition, Bharti had launched international data services using the network i2i submarine cable as the primary infrastructure backbone.

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