Private players zip past BSNL in PCO segment
Contrary to fears that India’s explosive mobile growth will spell the death knell for the neighbourhood Public Call Office (PCO), this segment continues to maintain a healthy growth rate, largely driven by private players.
By Joji Thomas Philip, TNN |
NEW DELHI: Contrary to fears that India’s explosive mobile growth will spell the death knell for the neighbourhood Public Call Office (PCO), this segment continues to maintain a healthy growth rate, largely driven by private players.
More importantly, for the first time, private players with a combined market share of 47.01%, have overtaken BSNL, which has for long dominated this sector.
Consider the figures — after crossing the 4m mark in the first quarter of the financial year, latest data from the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (for the quarter ended June ’06) reveal that the total number of PCOs have now crossed the 4.5-m mark. Data shows that over the last 12 months over a million PCOs have been installed across the country.
Reliance and Tata Teleservices with 173,529 and 57,000 additions, respectively, during this period, witnessed the maximum growth, followed by BSNL with 48,529 new connections.
Other private players such as Bharti, HFCL and Shyam Telecom (STL) have also had impressive growth rates. BSNL’s market share, which for the first time had dipped below the 50% mark during the last quarter, has now slid further to 46.92%.
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The only exception continues to be MTNL, which offers services in Mumbai and Delhi. Its PCO count, which had decreased by nearly 4,000 units in the quarter ending March ’06, has further fallen by 5,600 during the next quarter. The PSU currently has over 273,000 PCOs and a market share of 6%.While BSNL continues to be the market leader with over 2.1 million PCOs across the country, private players are fast closing in — Reliance Communications has crossed the million mark and Tata Teleservices has handed out close to 0.7m connections.
Additionally, data from both the department of telecommunications (DoT) and Trai also show BSNL was the preferred operator for PCOs until March, ’05. Till then BSNL had set up more units every quarter than all operators combined.
(BSNL had a market share of 68% and MTNL had 10% in March, ’05). Since then, the tide has turned and private operators combined have overtaken the PSU by a long margin every during every subsequent quarter.
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