New Delhi, May 12: Reliance Communications plans to 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," Reliance Communications CEO for wireless business Gurdeep Singh said on Friday.
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 the company has tied-up with Lenovo for CDMA smartphones and is in discussions with more vendors to launch CDMA handsets.
Reliance Communications said its non-voice services contributed around 21 per cent to its total revenue. It had 29.4 million mobile internet users during the March quarter.
Mr 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".
Reliance Communications reported a 8.73 per cent fall in net profit at Rs. 303 crore for its fourth quarter that ended on March 31, 2013 from Rs. 332 crore in the same quarter last financial year.
Total income of the company, however, rose 2.39 per cent 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, net profit declined 27.58 per cent to Rs. 672 crore for FY'13 as compared to Rs. 928 crore last year. The total income rose 4.49 per cent to Rs. 20,561 crore from Rs. 19,677 crore in 2011-12.
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.
Reliance Communications said it is "notional increase due to foreign exchange variations".
RCom stock, on Saturday, ended at Rs. 111.10 on the Bombay Stock Exchange, up 0.73 per cent from the previous close.
