BSNL to begin diligence on Zain, Vavasi soon

State-owned Bharat Sanchar Nigam Ltd (BSNL), which is eyeing stake in Kuwait’s mobile telecom company Zain Telecom to extend its footprint overseas, will begin due diligence on the phone services company “soon”.

Kuldeep Goyal, chairman and managing director of BSNL, said due-diligence will also be done on its New Delhi-based consortium partner Vavasi Group from which it had received a proposal to pick up stake in Zain.

Vavasi has already tied up with Malaysia’s Al-Bukhary group to form a consortium to bid for Zain’s stake.

Currently, besides Kuwait, BSNL is reportedly exploring other global markets such as Africa, Russia and western Europe, which have the potential for increasing tele-density.
The domestic telecom major is among the eight consortia shortlisted to participate in the bid to acquire up to 75% in Zambia’s state-run Zamtel.

In other geographies, Goyal said BSNL was considering options: “We are looking at various markets. We are participating in some of the bids and looking at various other options.”

He said there was no specific budget “earmarked for international forays.”

“It depends on what opportunity we are finally able to grab.”

In the domestic sector, where the company is facing stiff competition from local rivals who are eating into its market share, Goyal said BSNL is trying to augment revenue generation by leasing out infrastructure to other operators in the market.

“We are looking at various new business opportunities like sharing of infrastructure for increasing the revenue. We have already signed with number of operators for sharing our tower infrastructure and bandwidth,” said Goyal.

He said BSNL’s capital expenditure (capex) for the current fiscal was Rs 14,000 crore. Of this, the telecom company has already spent Rs 6,000 crore till now.