The Hindu Business Line : Sify posts Rs 11-cr loss in fourth quarter

SIFY Ltd has recorded a net loss of Rs 30.75 crore for the year ended March 2005. This is about 17 per cent lower than the Rs 37.12-crore net loss the previous year.

The company saw fourth quarter revenues rise 24.8 per cent to Rs 102.94 crore from Rs 82.44 crore the same time last year. It recorded a net loss of Rs 11.17 crore for the March quarter compared to a net profit of Rs 2.31 crore in the same quarter of the previous year.

The company's revenues rose 29 per cent to Rs 361.17 crore for the year (Rs 280.04 crore).

A company statement said, "If the profit on sale of businesses were to be excluded, the net loss for the current year would have been 37 per cent lower than in the previous year."

The company announced its results in dollar terms.

Sify's cash profit (profit before factoring in items such as taxes, interest, depreciation and amortisation) for the year was Rs 22.55 crore, an increase of 168 per cent over Rs 8.42 crore the previous year.

The company incurred a capital expenditure of Rs 49.73 crore and made a Rs 10.03-crore payment for IP-VPN licence entry fee. It ended the year with a cash balance of over Rs 135 crore.

The company statement said Sify's Corporate Services comprised 56 per cent revenues for the year, servicing over 1,000 clients. During the year, Sify won an order from Symbian, which sells operating systems for handheld devices, through the former's collaboration with Global Crossing.

In the information technology enabled services sector, substantial repeat orders were received from GE, Google, Hutch, Novell, Spectramind and Sapient. New wins included CSC, HCL Technologies, Omniglobe and Xansa.

Sify's retail Internet access business accounted for 39 per cent of the company's annual revenue.

Internet telephony grew more than 25 per cent over the previous quarter to reach 11.8 million minutes during the quarter ended March 2005.

Subscribers to Sify's broadband Internet access to homes exceeded 89,000, and the service now touches 52 cities. Revenues from the dial-up business, though, continued to decline, while the subscriber base decreased 5 per cent for the quarter.

On IP-VPN licensing, Sify has pointed out that the industry association, ISPAI, has launched a legal challenge contesting DoT's insistence that ISPs pay up licence fees for providing this service. "To date, the DoT has not issued the terms of the licence, nor has it come out with a definition of AGR," the statement said.

In December last year, Sify's shareholders approved a resolution to enable the conversion of up to 15.72 million Indian equity shares to ADRs. Subsequently, the company had registered for the resale of up to 4,538,200 Indian equity shares in the form of ADRs.

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