The wait goes on!
The state-run telecom behemoth completed one more year in the shadow of its past glory, with a north-bound movement not yet in sight
It has been quite a climb-down for Bharat Sanchar Nigam Limited (BSNL) from being the No. 1 telco in 2003 to No. 4 in the span of a decade. Not only Bharti Airtel upstaged it for the top slot, and Vodafone (earlier Hutch) surpassed it as well, others like Idea Cellular overtook it from a much lower rank in the
Voice&Data Top 10 tally. The last year showed no end to a continued state of decline. The staterun telco went one more notch down, mainly as Idea surged past with an industry leading subscriber growth.
Arguably, the PSTN and wireline broadband segments continue to hold a silver lining for BSNL, which retained its leadership in these segments by huge margins. While it held a subscriber share of 66 percent with about 18.94 million wireline subscribers as per TRAI data, it suffered an annual subscriber decline of close to 10 percent—from 21.04 million in December 2012 to 18.94 million in 2013.
State-run operator BSNL led the fixed broadband market segment with a 71.91 percent market share and a total of 13.18 million broadband subscribers, followed by Bharti Airtel at 1.47 million subscribers and MTNL at 1.11 million subscribers.
In the mobile market segment, the top five circles by subscribers for BSNL were UP(E), Tamil Nadu ( including Chennai), Andhra Pradesh, Kerala and Karnataka. However, in terms of subscriber shares, the top circles were Kerala, Himachal Pradesh, North East, Haryana, and Punjab.
In the fixed narrowband segment too, BSNL led with 84.30 percent subscriber share and 3.19 million subscribers, followed by YOU Broadband at 0.17 million subscribers and Bharti at 0.08 million subscribers, as per TRAI.
It has often been argued that one of the main reasons behind BSNL’s poor financial performance in the recent years has been an oversized employee base, when compared with the private-sector telcos. The argument could only be half the truth. It is also important to note that when it comes to serving a large and widely dispersed base of wireline customers then a larger employee base is a necessity. A solution probably lies in leveraging the human resource better by way of identifying new potential wireline customers and bringing them to the services fold. Enterprise and business customer segments could be the focus areas in this regard.
The complexities in its strategic decision making processes, which are further affected by tender-driven vendor selection processes that could get frustratingly slow and unpredictable, further blunt the competitiveness of the company.
In the past, some ambitious multimillion GSM line tenders have not been able to come to a logical conclusion. More recently, the National Fiber Optical Network (NOFN) project, in which BSNL has been a key stakeholder, too has suffered its share of delays and setbacks. However, with a strong government at the center, it is expected that the decision making process would be positively affected.