The communications market in India for the fiscal 1999-00 is estimated at Rs 53,173.52 crore a growth of about 22 percent over the 1998-99 figures of Rs 43,609.42 crore. Increase in the number of communication companies and a good economy were responsible for this impressive performance.

The Department of Telecommunications (DoT) contributed the lion’s share with an estimated Rs 20,405.83 crore to the total turnover. If the planned corporatization of DoT gets completed by 30 September 2000, which seems unlikely, the net revenue would increase further. According to officials in DoT, AF Fergusson, the consultants for the DoT corporatization process, has valued DoT at Rs 2,50,000 crore.

The V&D 100 Club companies contributed Rs 28,447.14 crore, while others contributed a total of Rs 4,320.55 crore. The others category includes companies like Motorola, Siemens Public Communications Network Ltd, Agilent, Shyam Telecom, Hindustan Cables, and others that did not participate in the survey. It also includes companies outside the V&D 100 Club, which are featured in the survey.

The Top 10 Club contributed 35.9 percent of the total revenue with combined revenues of Rs 19,085.5 crore. This time Lucent had a wild card entry to the Top 10 Club as it performed exceptionally well by netting a turnover of Rs 452.5 crore, registering a growth of around 170 percent—the highest in the group.

The top three players—VSNL, MTNL, and ITI—retained their positions this time also. Sterlite moved up the ladder from #5 to #4, whereas TCIL slid down to be at #5. Wipro repeated its three-figure growth and moved from #9 to #7. HFCL and HTL slipped one position each in the ranking.

It was clearly a services-dominated V&D 100 Club. As many as 33 services companies featured in the top bracket. Cellular companies occupied 19 positions while three positions went to paging companies. Internet and basic services providers occupied two and four positions respectively. Not surprisingly, five public sector companies featured in the Top 10 Club with combined turnover of Rs 16,072.3 crore.

There were actually 107 companies in the Top 100 bracket because seven companies shared their ranks. Bhagyanagar Metals and Birla Ericsson were jointly ranked 26th, MRO-Tek and Escotel were ranked 44th, Apcom and Optel shared the 74th rank, Tata Infotech and Modi Telstra were ranked 79th, Usha Martin Telekom and Gujarat Communications shared the 83rd rank, and Bharti BT, Srinivas Cellcom, Hexacomm shared the 97th rank. A total of about 600 companies have been profiled this time in the survey.

We have attempted to provide more detailed information about the top companies this time. Not only that, even the number of segments have been increased from 12 to 18 for the purpose of analysis. The new segments include telecom training, feature phones, computer telephony, call centre, telco software, and PCO. There is also a new section on Top Groups in the telecommunication field.

In the Sixth V&D 100 Survey, the companies were ranked on the basis of their turnover during the 1999-00 fiscal (1 April 1999-30 March 2000). The turnovers have been taken from the filled-in questionnaires sent by the companies. Wherever the turnovers were not mentioned, estimates were made for the purpose of ranking.