We are working on plans to turn around the company this year

How has MTNL performed in FY11?

Our broadband subscriber base has grown more than we estimated. However fixedline is on a decline which is quite natural because of the utility and convenience factor. Also human resources are being gradually justified; we have reached below 50,000 now which is helping our bottomline.

We saw major uptake in 3G services and subscriptions, mostly on the data front. Earlier the data usage in both our services areas was around 50 GB per day. But now, it has grown to 1,400 to 1,500 GB data usage in each city. We floated the idea to offer our service areas to the operators, who do not have 3G licenses in Delhi and MTNL. Many operators have shown interest and sent their requests to us. This way we can get an extra revenue stream for our unutilized resources.

Why is MTNL making losses? And what are you doing to increase your bottomline?

We are figuring out our bottlenecks like customer care and marketing, new revenue streams, etc. Customer care and marketing is being outsourced, manpower issues are being justified gradually and on new revenue streams, we are betting big on enterprise services. The plan is to create a separate arm for marketing and customer care activities. This will in turn take care of our outsourcing needs for the same. We are connecting around 86 CGHS hospitals in Delhi and providing our backbone to them. We are also connecting all the police stations in Delhi through our IP-MPLS network to provide them seamless connectivity for voice, data, and video. Connecting universities of Delhi and Mumbai are also in the pipeline. To make the devices affordable to our customers, we are working on partnering with many device makers like Nokia, Samsung, and Micromax.

What was you capex investment last fiscal?

We do invest periodically as and  when required for our infrastructure and for our expansion. For example, during CWG 2010, we invested a good amount of money for our IP-MPLS network. We had earmarked a capex investment of `1,281 crore for FY11 and another `1,100 crore for FY12.

Which are the new things planned for the current financial year?

We are waiting for the MVNO policies which I believe would give us a momentum in reaching different kinds of customers. In MVNO, we are looking at tapping the young generation and a service with youth appeal coupled with our robust network would be a deadly mix for the industry. Apart from that, we are looking at entering wholesale business of broadband and BWA, and we are also looking at a franchise model for this business.