Sistema Shyam Teleservices Ltd.’s (SSTL) decision to foray into mobile services over the CDMA platform as compared to other new entrants who choose GSM, seems to be paying off big time to the operator. The company’s growth rate for revenues is seen at the highest level among all the operators including incumbent GSM and CDMA operators.

While SSTL had registered revenues of Rs 27.84 crore for the June’08 quarter, the company’s revenues for June’09 reached Rs 37.35 crore at a yoy growth rate of 34.15 % and a qoq growth rate of almost 22 % when compared to March’09 figures of Rs 30.64 crore. Over the period from June’08 to June’09 SSTL’s MTS brand has launched its services in all the Southern circles, circles of Bihar & Jharkhand as well as recently launching its services in Delhi/NCR to start its North India foray.

However its counterpart CDMA operators, RCom and Tata Teleservices seem to have got their calculations wrong while foraying into GSM platform. Both the operators who had announced big war chest while foraying into the GSM domain disappointingly or rather alarmingly are witnessing significant drop in revenue.

Gross Revenues of operators in Rs crore.

Take RCom for instance. The company had revenues of Rs 4178.64 crore in June’08. But this scaled down to Rs 3049.18 crore in June’09, a drop of Rs 1129.46 crore at a negative growth rate of 27 %. Even when compared to March’09 figures of Rs 3132.32 crore, the decline is at a rate of 2.65 %.

Similar trends are observed for Tata Teleservices. The company had revenues of Rs 2928.28 crore in June’08 while it ended with only Rs 1868 crore in June’09 at a yoy decline of 36.28 %.

PSUs BSNL and MTNL also witnessed disappointing negative growth rates of 22.96% and 21.71 % respectively.

Among GSM operators, Aircel is seen maintaining a healthy growth rate in revenue generation at 18 % with Idea Cellular performing even better at 24% growth rate. Market leader, Bharti Airtel however saw a negative growth rate of 5.93 % while Vodafone Essar managed a growth rate of 8.4 %.  

Overall the Indian telco community recorded 10.81 % drop in revenues with total revenues of Rs 31,240 crore in June’09 as compared to Rs 35027.2 crore in June’08.