Financial Daily from THE HINDU group of publications
Tuesday, Jul 16, 2002
Financial Daily from THE HINDU group of publications Tuesday, Jul 16, 2002 |
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Info-Tech
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Telecommunications Tata Tele seeks to raise Rs 2,400 cr via debt G. Rambabu
NEW DELHI, July 15 TATA Teleservices Ltd (TTL), the telecom basic services arm of the Tata group, has mandated IDBI, SBI Caps and Standard Chartered Bank to arrange for its debt requirement in the range of Rs 2,000 - Rs 2,400 crore. According to industry sources, the company has informally commenced discussions with potential lenders including FIIs and banks, both domestic and foreign, for its debt requirement. TTL, which is on the verge of launching its basic operations in Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, Delhi and Gujarat, also holds the licence for Haryana, Punjab and Kerala circles. It is already a basic service provider in Andhra Pradesh. The sources noted that over the next four years, TTL had envisaged the total project cost to be Rs 8,247 crore of which Rs 4,325 crore would form the equity part and the remaining Rs 3,922 crore its debt requirement. As of now, the equity portion has been allocated between the Tata Group (Rs 2,552 crore), VSNL (Rs 1,200 crore) and non-Tata (Rs 573 crore). It may be recalled that a final decision on VSNL's stake in the company is to be decided only after August 15, when the final report of committee constituted for this purpose is submitted. The sources noted that when fully operational across all the circles, TTL hopes to service approximately 70 per cent of the total voice and data traffic in the country. The company is positioning itself as ``the complete telecom company'', offering wireline, fixed wireless, limited mobility, data services and a host of integrated telecom solutions. For the corporate customers, the company would be offering augmented telecom services for Internet and data traffic, such as ISDN, DSL, xDSL, Virtual Private Networks etc. They noted that the company had consciously decided to offer limited mobility services using the CDMA 2001x technology for offering 3G services to its customers in all the new circles - Delhi, Gujarat, Tamil Nadu and Karnataka - where they plan to roll out basic services. Even for the other three circles — Haryana, Punjab and Kerala where TTL has the licence to offer basic services, the company will be offering 3G services on the CDMA 2001X platform. For the past three years, the company has been operating basic telecom services in Andhra Pradesh and has over 1.5 lakh satisfied customers. An investment of Rs 1,475 crore has already been made to build the network in the circle, which includes over 1,050 km of optic fibre cable. It plans to invest another Rs 300 crore in the next two years and cumulative investment over the licence period would be in the order of Rs 2,000 crore.
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