The Hindu Business Line : TTSL doing a `clean-up act'

IN a shocking performance for a high profile company in an industry which is supposed to be in the robust spring of its youth, Tata Teleservices' subscriber base has depleted by nearly 10,000 in the wireline segment and by over 5,000 digital mobile (CDMA) subscribers across its eight circles of operations during April.According to the company, this is not to be seen as a big loss as it was the result of a massive clean up exercise during which its subscriber base was picked free of defaulting customers.

Industry analysts who have often questioned the customer quality of telecom players and the rate of default in the industry, said such a default situation is probably a feature across the industry and cannot be restricted to one player alone.

The subscriber statistics put out by the Association of Basic Telecom Operators (ABTO) show that TTSL and its subsidiary Tata Teleservices (Maharashtra) Ltd together lost 9,595 wireline subscribers and 5809 CDMA mobile subscribers last month.

In March too TTSL had lost 5,714 mobile customers but had added 5,459 wireline customers.

However, TTSL has added 82,683 new fixed wireless subscribers in April on account of which its overall increase in subscriber base is 67,279 for the month. Its total subscriber base itself stands at 1,696,688 or nearly 1.7 million as of April-end.

"Our focus during the month was to clean up the system by churning out customers with prolonged payment defaults and releasing this capacity for reselling to genuine customers," said Mr Amit Bose, President, Telecom, TTSL.

"But our enhanced capacity is in place this month. We will seek to effectively increase our rate of customer acquisition through a major sales and marketing thrust," he said.

Bharti Telenet, a less high profile name than TTSL in the wireline market, has added 20,316 wireline subscribers during April although it lost 125 fixed wireless subscribers. Bharti does not exist in the CDMA mobile space.

According to ABTO statistics Reliance Infocomm has added 3,05,089 subscribers in all during April, 263,181 of them in the CDMA mobile segment and 41,908 in the fixed wireless segment. Its total subscriber base is 7,282,790.

In fact, Reliance's additions in the CDMA mobile segment — at 263,181 - are higher than the CDMA mobile additions of all the players put together (2,59,233) during the month. This indicates that the private CDMA mobile segment excluding Reliance has in the net lost customers.

Apart from TTSL, Shyam Telecom's subscriber base in Rajasthan has shown negative growth in April, coming down by 263 in the mobile segment, and 255 in the fixed wireless segment. HFCL Infotel in Punjab has shown modest increase in subscriber base across segments. Figures for the public sector Bharat Sanchar Nigam Ltd are not available yet.

The loss of subscriber base on the part of a large player such as TTSL is not good for the industry, said an industry analyst.

Even if it is due to a clean-up exercise, it shows up how bad the customer-default problem is in the industry, he said.