Anupam Shrivastava, chairman and managing director of Bharat Sanchar Nigam (BSNL), said the Indian telecom operator aims to focus on gaining subscriber market share and accelerate the growing enterprise business to protect revenue.
“We are going to grow our revenue on the back of the enterprise business, infrastructure sharing, collaboration for FTTH broadband and other services in 2018-19,” Anupam Shrivastava said.

BSNL has reported total revenue of about Rs 32,000 crore and revenue from operations of about Rs 28,000 crore in fiscal 2016-17, with EBITDA of about Rs 1,700 crore.

“While the number is still to come out for 2017-18, we expect that EBITDA should remain in positive territory in spite of competition in the market. We expect to reduce net loss through lower expenditure. We expect to maintain our revenue at the same level as last year during 2017-18,” Anupam Shrivastava said.

The company, which does not have operations in Mumbai and Delhi, did not reveal the specific plan to lower expenditure. If the company is going to slash Capex (capital spending) it will bring down quality of experience to wireless subscribers. BSNL has lost considerable revenue in the recent past as heavy users moved to competition.
India government owned BSNL is aiming to generate profit in fiscal 2019-20, a year later than previously estimated, according to media reports.

BSNL will not be able to generate profit this year due to disruption in the wireless market and fall in cellular tariffs. Reliance Jio, a 4G operator owned by Mukesh Ambani, has forced rival telecom operators such as Airtel, Idea Cellular and Vodafone to go for cost effective voice and data plans to retain their wireless subscribers.

“In this financial year, it won’t be possible…because the market has disrupted a lot and many companies are in red. We hope that in 2019-20 we will be able to swing into net profit,” said Anupam Shrivastava.

BSNL has gained market share at a time when rival private operators had seen that metric static. “We gained customers from companies that were closing operations. We did a mid-course correction. We realised that in this disruptive market, there is no point in focusing solely on revenue but also customer market share,” Anupam Shrivastava said.

BSNL has reported loss of Rs 4,786 crore in 2016-17, marginally lower than Rs 4,875 crore in 2015-16. The losses have narrowed sharply from Rs 8,234 crore in 2014-15.