• PAGE ONE
• INDEX
• HOME

Bharti Telecom to hold back ADR issue

Our Bureau

NEW DELHI, July 10

BHARTI Telecom has decided to hold back its proposed $ 150-200 million American Depository Receipts (ADR) issue till existing policy-bottlenecks, such as expiry of lock-in period on equity holding in cellular firms are cleared and a final decision on rev enue sharing with the Government is through.

Chairman of the Bharti Group, Mr. Sunil Bharti Mittal, told Business Line on Monday that the company would still like to go for the float this year. ``Preliminary procedures are almost complete, though we are yet to finalise the advisors to the proposed issue,'' he said.

He added, ``But, we will not like to go to the market without sorting out these problems. Global investors may not respond to the issue at this juncture with so many issues pending clearance by the Government.''

However, Mr. Mittal also said he was hopeful that most of these issues would be sorted out by the end of the year. The lock-in period for holding in cellular companies would end this October, and the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) is expect ed to give its final decision on revenue sharing and other modalities of cellular services within a month.

The money raised from the US market, following an NYSE listing, would be used for the company's expansion programme, including expansion of the existing cellular networks in Delhi, Chennai, Andhra Pradesh and Karnataka, and basic telephone network in Mad hya Pradesh.

The company is planning a foray in the national long distance (NLD) sector once it is opened to private operators. Mr. Rakesh Bharti Mittal, Managing Director of Bharti Enterprises, said Bharti will invest around Rs. 2,000 crores in NLD services, in cons ortium with two or more foreign companies. When asked if talks were on with Vivendi and SingTel, Mr. Sunil Mittal said Vivendi was one of Bharti's major alliance partners alongwith British Telecom, which by virtue of being an existing business partner, b ecomes the most-preferred partner for NLD as well.

The Mittals said they would also bid strongly for other basic circles as the company's success in Madhya Pradesh had made basic services a priority business.

Bharti joins hands with IIT

Bharti Enterprises and the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi, on Monday, joined hands to establish the Bharti School of Telecommunication technology and Management.

This is the first time in the history of IIT, Delhi, that it has tied up with a corporate house to offer a degree course.

The School will offer two courses -- a 2-year full-time MBA in telecom Infrastructure Management and an 18-month Master of Technology programme in Telecom Technology and Management. Students of the courses will be offered IIT degrees and will be selected through IIT admission rules, officials said.

Bharti will sponsor the students enrolled with the course and it said that it would have no role to play except sponsoring the students and offering industry expertise. Only three out of ten board members of the school will be Bharti representatives.

Around 100 students will be admitted every year to the two courses. Mr. Sunil Mittal announced the setting up of the Bharti Foundation with a corpus of Rs. 20 crores. Out of this, Rs. 10 crores would be spent on creating a new building complex for the s chool within the IIT campus. Efforts are on to arrange exchange programmes for students and teachers of the school with other foundations run by foreign telecom companies, such as Motorola and Cable and Wireless, Mr. Mittal added.