Bharti will also invest $1 million to enhance its phone-making capacities in the next fiscal 2001-02. Says Mr Rakesh Bharti Mittal, vice-chairman and managing director, Bharti Teletech: ``Our plan is to increase capacities to 10 million phones a year by 2007 up from 4.5 million a year currently.''

In terms of value, the Rs 200-crore Bharti Teletech expects to secure a telephone turnover of Rs 120 crore in the current fiscal 2000-01 up from Rs 80 crore in 1999-00. For fiscal 2001-02, it plans to do business of Rs 160 crore from the Beetel brand.

``In the next fiscal, we expect the retail contribution to rise from 20 per cent to 25 per cent of our overall telephone sales,'' says Mr Mittal. ``The retail segment should contribute around Rs 50 crore in 2001-02.''

Currently, institutional sales (Bharti meets 30 per cent share of the BSNL and MTNL demand) accounts for around 70 per cent of Bharti Teletech's telephone sales, exports 10 per cent and retail 20 per cent.

As per its new drive, even as Bharti Teletech maintains its presence in the institutional segment it will accelerate sales by focusing on expanding its retail reach and export operations.

Bharti Teletech proposes to enhance its distribution network from 3,500 retailers to 5,000 retailers across the country in fiscal 2001-02. The company will, however, not add more distributors to its network of 150 distributors.

Repositioning the Beetel brand Also, moving away from the two-brand strategy (upscale Siemens brand and popular Beetel), Bharti Teletech will focus on establishing sole brand Beetel across all segments. ``We plan to invest significantly in brand building - the ad campaign will be handled by Percept - and promotions this year,'' says Mr Mittal. ``For the first time we'll undertake the brand auditing of Beetel by the middle of the year.''

Prior to the acquisition of Siemens shares in the joint venture company to form Bharti Systel Ltd in September 2000, Bharti had two brands: Beetel and Siemens. Under the new positioning strategy, all Siemens products came under the umbrella of the Beetel brand. Also, the boxy logo was given a contemporary look with small-and-blue lettering. `India's favourite phone' became Beetel's positioning statement - this was partly to re-inforce that Beetel was the country's largest selling brand.

Says Mr Mittal, ``Earlier the thrust of our advertising was on Siemens brand. Now our task is to establish the brand across all retailsegments.''

Currently, for the retail market, the Beetel brand portfolio has over 20 products in basic telephone, low-end and top-end feature phones, cordless sets and also answering machines in the price range of Rs 445 to Rs 2,500.

By March 2001, Bharti would have sold over 13 million phones - the Indian market is said to have around 30 million telephone lines and over 45 million phones. Bharti is at present supplying to private service providers in five states.

These are: Bharti, Tata, Hughes, Shyam and HFCL. Bharti is also keenly awaiting basic services licences in the next couple of months - it is bidding for eight basic service licences.