Ericsson waits to hear from BSNL

NEW DELHI: Swedish equipment supplier Ericsson, which had emerged the lowest bidder in BSNL's controversial 45.5 million line GSM tender, on Wednesday said it was waiting to hear from the public sector company about the fate of the contract.
    
"We are eagerly awaiting an official communication from BSNL. We have no idea about it and we do not want to comment on any speculation," Mats Granryd, Managing Director of Ericsson India, here after signing a two billion dollar outsourcing deal with Bharti Airtel.

BSNL, which has lost substantial market share due to delay in adding capacity, may have to reduce the size of original tender by as much as half due to Communication Minister A Raja's insistence on a lower price from Ericsson.

Ericsson had quoted a price of 107 dollar per line, but Raja wanted BSNL to renegotiate the price to bring it down to below 90 dollar.

Meanwhile, BSNL's competitor Bharti Airtel, which is looking to tap customers unserved by BSNL due to capacity constraint, said it never rejoiced at temporary troubles of other operators.

"We believe in competition... we are adding close to two million subscribers a month and hope to sustain it in future also," Akhil Gupta, Bharti Airtel Joint Managing Director, said.

Asked if Ericsson had offered a lower price to Bharti than to BSNL, Gupta said: "In a competitive scenario, things cannot be drastically different. But in case of BSNL they priced the supplies on per line basis whereas our model is based on capacity. Both models are different and thus cannot be compared."