Videocon pulls the plug on telecom services in 3 circles

TRAI data shows the company has no subscribers in Uttar Pradesh East & West and Bihar.

In May this year, the Videocon group decided to scale down its telecom operations in three circles out of the six it was operating in. The operator, Datacom, now has subscribers only in Gujarat, Haryana and Madhya Pradesh, according to the latest data from the telecom regulator.

In the spectrum auctions held in last November, Videocon had reclaimed licences in six circles for Rs 2,222 crore. But now, its operations in the northern belt - Uttar Pradesh East, Uttar Pradesh West and Bihar - are all but shut. These circles show zero subscribers in the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (Trai)'s data.

The operator has 2.28 million subscribers in three circles. Most of its subscribers are in Haryana.

Arvind Bali, chief executive of the telecom business of the company, said, its operations in the three northern circles had always been a non-starter. "We have not yet launched commercial operations in them. And, the subscribers we had in these circles have been friendly subscribers - our employees and trade partners." Bali added the company was still working on its strategy for these circles.

According to TRAI the percentage of subscribers active in the Bihar circle is 0.5 per cent. That puts the number of active subscribers at 92. In UP-East and UP-West, too, 0.94 per cent and 1.35 per cent subscribers were active, respectively. The effective subscribers in UP-East and UP-West the operator had in April were at 137 and 48, respectively.

Datacom also had the disadvantage of being the last operator to launch services in early 2010. This was in the middle of the tariff war and all the big and serious players were already bombarding the markets with advertising efforts.

Like many of its Indian peers, Videocon also had plans to sell 26% stake in its company to a foreign telecom holding around the time it had launched its operations. However, before they could go ahead with their plans, tariff war had made telecom a difficult sector making foreign telecom operators lose interest in further investments.

Source: http://cablequest.org/news/telecom-news/item/3128-videocon-pulls-the-plug-on-telecom-services-in-3-circles.html

Source: http://cablequest.org/news/telecom-news/item/3128-videocon-pulls-the-plug-on-telecom-services-in-3-circles.html