The Mahanagar Telephone Nigam Limited has set the cat among the pigeons by announcing its tariff for its cellular services to be launch in Delhi on January 31, 2001 and in Mumbai on February 28, 2001. With the entry of MTNL as the third cellular opreator in the two of the most lucrative markets, a vicious price war seems to be in the offing already. In an exclusive interview with Shalini Dagar, the chairman and managing director of MTNL, Narinder Sharma plays safe - and price warrior - in one swoop. Excerpts:The cellular players in Delhi are already indicating that they will drop prices in the coming weeks. Would MTNL follow suit by undercutting tarifs further?I don't think the other players will come to a point in tariff reduction where we will have to reduce our tariffs.
There are aspersions being cast on the quality of service that MTNL will be able to provide in its cellular services. How do you react to that?It is a GSM-based cellular state-of-the-art network provided by Lucent. It will be on par with the exisiting networks. There is of course, the issue of network optimisation. That happens over a period of time. And we are doing `more than normal' to ensure the best services. However, I can assure that our services will be much better than the services of the existing operators when they started out.
``The NYSE listing should happen soon''There are also concerns over the unfair advantage you might have due to cross-subsidisation...That is absolutely untrue. We have formed a separate division, known as MTNL Cellular for the purpose. We will be formailsing the details in a day or two. Further, even TRAI has gone through our tariffs and found nothing of the sort.
What are your projections for this quarter from the celluar service?On a conservative estimate we expect 25,000 subscribers this quarter. At the very least.
Now that the cellular service has been announced, will you also soon fulfil MTNL's other pending promise: to list on the NYSE?
All I can say is that I had promised that the cellular services will begin in January 2001 and they have. Similarly, for NYSE listing the formalities from our side have been completed. And the listing should happen soon.
What according to you is the price which is truly reflective of the worth of MTNL?
I would say that the true price of MTNL is well above Rs 300 per share.
Copyright © 2001 Indian Express Newspapers (Bombay) Ltd.
