BSNL to lease property and towers: Raise money for operations
The telecom department explores ways to resurrect the loss-making telecom company BSNL and help it meet capex costs. Bharat Sanchar Nigam plans to raise nearly Rs 6,000 crore of fresh resources by monetizing property holdings and sharing/leasing its 73,000-odd mobile towers.
The state-run telco also proposes to boost cash flows by targeting 45 % revenue growth over the next five years and leasing out infrastructure across its telecom factories and training centres. BSNL is one of the richest companies in terms of their asset and land holdings. However due to poor governance, measures were not taken to use this land bank and earn revenues.
BSNL is one of the largest land-bank holders among state-owned firms with properties running into thousands of crores of rupees across some 3,500 towns.
It is estimated that utilisation of BSNL’s land assets can immediately generate over Rs 4,000 crore and projected revenue from sharing and leasing of its passive infrastructure like towers can garner another Rs 1600 crore.
Leveraging its tower infrastructure is top priority since nearly 50,000 of these towers are linked by optic fibre cable, which is handy for supporting high-speed data services. However unfortunately in our country the private sector always looks at ways to increase the revenues, however no one pays heed to the government sector companies.
Source- The Economic Times
