ITI eyes MoU target, loss down marginally

Bangalore, Sep 28 (UNI) The limping Indian Telephone Industries (ITI) today expressed confidence in fulfilling its MoU revenue target of Rs 4,770 crore for the current fiscal.

Addressing the 57th AGM of the beleaguered telecom company which had recorded a Rs 405 crore loss for 2006-07, Chairman and Managing Director S K Chatterjee said ITI was poised to meet the target with Rs 1,900 crore worth orders in hand with anticipated working capital assistance forthcoming.

The turnaround strategy of the company was to harness the vast potential in the areas of wireless and personal communications by securing the status of the largest indigenous manufacturer and builder of GSM and CDMA-WLL networks and by broadbasing its strategic relationship with customers such as BSNL, MTNL and Defence. IT networking would be another area of growth.

The company reported a sales turnover of Rs 1,818 crore. For the fifth successive year, the company had incurred huge loss though it had come down marginally from Rs 429 crore the previous year.

The cumulative loss suffered by ITI since 2002-03, when it went into red again, was RS 2,225 crore.

In the last fiscal, 532 employees had taken voluntary retirement taking the total number of VRS staff to 13,744 till August last year.

ITI's forays into IT and networking space had been rewarding as it had successfully deployed a nationwide managed leased line network and standalone signaling transfer point network for BSNL.

It was all set to take up the challenge of expanding these networks covering more than 400 cities. ITI was also one of the four vendors who would take up the national ID project.

He said efforts were on to indigenise inputs for GSM to minimise material procurement cost.

UNI