Reliance Communications to use CDMA spectrum for data services, GSM for voice

Reliance Communications on Friday said it would use CDMA spectrum mainly for providing wireless Internet services to increase revenues and migrate its predominantly voice customers to GSM technology platform.

"The intent is to reduce dependence of pure play CDMA voice customers. The customers who don't use data, we will be migrating them to GSM spectrum and will free up spectrum for more and more data usage," RCom Chief Executive Officer for Wireless Business, Gurdeep Singh told PTI.

He said the company has formed its strategy defined around spectrum and is looking to convert CDMA spectrum for high speed wireless Internet services.

"GSM and data (Internet services) put together are driving our growth. GSM and data revenue now contribute 64 per cent to our wireless revenue, up from 57 per cent a year ago.

We want to populate that network (CDMA) with dongles and CDMA smartphones," he said.

He added that RCom has tied-up with Lenovo for CDMA smartphones and is in discussions with more vendors to launch CDMA handsets.

RCom said its non-voice services contributed around 21 percent to its total revenue. It had 29.4 million mobile Internet users during the January-March quarter.

Singh said the company is seeing growth opportunity in this area as "other CDMA players reduce their footprint or have given up spectrum. We believe we have a strong opportunity to drive dominant position in a large screen format broadband access which is through dongles route and populate more phones of CDMA on to network".

RCom today reported 8.73 percent dip in net profit at Rs. 303 crore for the fourth quarter ended March 31, 2013 from Rs 332 crore in the same quarter last financial year.

Total income of the company, however, rose 2.39 percent to Rs. 5,130 crore during the January-March quarter as compared to Rs. 5,010 crore in the same period last year.

On yearly basis, the net profit declined 27.58 percent to Rs 672 crore for FY'13 as compared to Rs. 928 crore last year. The total income rose 4.49 percent to Rs. 20,561 crore from Rs. 19,677 crore in 2011-12.

The net debt of the company increased to Rs. 38,864 crore during the reported quarter from Rs. 37,360 crore as on December 31, 2012.

RCom said it is "notional increase due to foreign exchange variations".

RCom scrip closed at Rs. 110.30, up 0.55 percent, on the BSE.