FACTSHEET |
CEO: S Rajagopalan
Year of Start-up: 1986 Area of Operation: Basic services, leased-line provision, Internet Address: 12th Floor, Tower 1, Jeevan Bharti Building, 124, Connaught Tel.: 011-332 2292, 373 2212 Fax: 011-331 7344 Web Site: www.mtnl.net.in |
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last fiscal proved once again that MTNL is definitely a profit making company.
It had a net profit of Rs 1,297 crore, a margin of 25.8 percent, in 1998-99. And
in the last fiscal, it increased it to Rs 1,693 crore, a margin of 32.6 percent.
Last fiscal, its turnover was Rs 5,385.9 crore, a growth of 7.02 percent over
the previous fiscal. It has more than 300 km of optical fibre cables in both
Delhi and Mumbai, and a telephone system with total switching capacity of at
least 20 lakh lines each in the two cities. No doubt that private companies will
take years to get even near to what MTNL already has.
MTNL has also performed reasonably well in terms of providing
telephone connections. Both Delhi and Mumbai today have a teledensity of more
than 15 percent. This is commendable, considering that the national teledensity
is roughly 2.6.
It is only when you start seeing MTNL from a historical
perspective that you start wondering whether this monopoly deserves the
"mini navratna" status it enjoys.
MTNL was born in 1986, which is more than a decade ago. Is
just 15 percent of Delhi and Mumbai’s population capable of owning a phone?
Till couple of years ago, MTNL did not provide value-added facilities like ISDN,
toll-free services, virtual calling cards, and
Virtual Private Network (VPN). Also, it was just last year that MTNL started its
own Internet services. Despite its huge telephone subscriber base, MTNL has not
been able to convert a large number of them as Internet subscribers. Though it
tried introducing a radio phone service some years back, in which it failed,
MTNL came to believe in the real potential of cellular mobile phone services
only a few years back. Worse, it is still struggling to get it operational. Its
history is even worse when it comes to providing dedicated links to corporates.
Customers complain that MTNL does not have the term "quality of
service" in its dictionary.
SWOT |
STRENGTH
Operates in Delhi and Mumbai, the political and commercial capitals of WEAKNESS Privatization problems OPPORTUNITY Bandwidth provision, cellular telephony, corporate services THREAT Small and nimble competitors without legacies of extra manpower or old |
It may not agree that it has a forgettable past. But
certainly, most critics agree that MTNL has benefited the most from the
competitive atmosphere that ensued from privatization of telecommunications. The
cellular services provided by the metro operators was a big eye opener to the
importance of having an efficient customer care infrastructure and on being seen
as a company rather than a government department. To a great extent, MTNL owes a
lot to its outgoing chairman S Rajagopalan, who instilled a competitive spirit
among his staff and did a major rehauling in terms of modernizing MTNL’s
services. The Intilligent Network (in) services got deployed, services like
Managed Data Network (MDN) services got operational, and the drive to digitize
and optimize the network through optical networking and new transmission
technologies like SDH got more intense. New services like Internet and cellular
services were rightly marked as the services of the future.
MTNL, as it stands today, is clearly a company at crossroads. It is a company
with a digital network going in for a listing on New York Stock Exchange (NYSE)
and yet has the burden of carrying over six lakh employees into the New Economy.
A company which talks of online bill payment and mobile bill collection vans and
yet has the potential of holding the two metropolis on ransom by striking on the
mere mention of privatization. The million dollar question is, will MTNL
employees remain prisoners of yesterday or grow up to become millionaire stake
holders?