Another turnaround call rings for BSNL
Live MintMUMBAI : It was the year when Lehman Brothers, the fourth largest investment bank on Wall Street at that point, went bust. In fact, in an answer to a question raised in the Lok Sabha in March 2013, the then communications minister Kapil Sibal had said that one reason for the rising losses of BSNL was the “fixed to mobile substitution," with the market having moved on from landline phones to mobile phones. Sinha offered other reasons for BSNL’s losses, including the company having to provide telecom services in non-profitable areas like remote and hilly regions, and inherent delays in taking decisions. The only way for BSNL to become profitable from here on, while maintaining the current employee cost structure, is to increase its income from operations, which means selling more mobile phone connections. The trouble is that as of May, of the 52.1 crore mobile phone connections in rural areas, only around 7% used BSNL.