The Hindu Business Line : RCom to market Yipes products in India

Mumbai, July 16 Reliance Communications, which acquired the US-based Yipes Holdings, plans to spend Rs 1,000 crore in the next couple of years to market the US company’s products.

“We will be spending about Rs 1,000 crore in the next couple of years to roll out Yipes products across the globe,” said Mr Punit Garg, President, Global Business, Reliance Communications.

For India, Reliance plans to roll out some of Yipes’ products on the existing infrastructure it has in place. Yipes currently services nearly 1,000 enterprise customers across verticals such as finance, legal, government and healthcare.

Yipes Managed Premium Internet, Yipes Hawkeye, Yipes OnDemand are some of the products that the company has in its portfolio.

Its financial product FinancialConnect! (for electronic trading and market data distribution) are used by the New York Stock Exchange, Chicago Mercantile Stock Exchange other major exchanges for communicating with the traders.

“We want to bring these technologies to Indian stock and commodity exchanges and replicate these models here,” said Mr Garg.

Reliance will initiate talks with the various government machineries to showcase e-governance and e- connectivity related Yipes products, he added.

At a press conference called to announce the deal with Yipes, Mr Anil Ambani, Chairman of Reliance Communications, said the company has invested Rs 2,000 crore for the expansion of Flag network and the entire investment was made from the cash flow generated from Flag’s operations.

“Flag is profitable at the net level for the first time,” he said. About Rs 6,000 crore would be invested in Flag’s Global Next Generation Network over the next few years for global expansion.

“Flag Telecom will be listed during the course of the year,” Mr Ambani said.

RCom’s subscriber base has swelled by 20 million after it was listed on stock exchanges in January 2006, taking its total to 35-million subscribers.

Its market cap hovers around Rs 1,50,000 crore.