"Every story has three sides to it—yours, mine, and the facts."
— FM Russel

For you—the industry—it is the cyclical feel-good and feel-bad phases, that do change but not that rapidly. For us, the media, exceptions—good or bad—make good copies throughout the year.

Once a year, with your active involvement, we do embark on a journey of finding the facts. Follow-ups, more follow-ups, interviews, pages and pages of calculations, arguments, explanations among ourselves...and lo, we are before you with the facts. We are before you with V&D100.

There is no point attaching adjectives and ornamentations, you know what V&D100 is—our best effort to present you with as much facts as we can on the performance of communications industry in India in the year 2001-02.

Some of the findings will, of course, look too obvious to you, some will straightaway challenge what you believed so far, and some will take you by surprise. Facts are facts. They are not yours, not ours, they are just, well...facts.

On the face of it, a year in which different segments grew at rates varying from -26 percent to 41 percent, is at best a mixed year. But go a step further, and you will find the segments that had a negative growth, accounted for less than 0.5 percent of the size of the industry.

So was it a good year? It was, but that is not the exciting part. For example, the segments that grew at the highest rates were cellular service and mobile handsets businesses, at growth rates of 39.3 percent and 41.4 percent respectively. The industry was a star last year too.

However, apart from the fact we have done some calculations, and put a couple of numbers that can be quoted, there is hardly anything surprising about it. You knew it. We knew it. The facts just reinforced it.

The more exciting part now. The carrier equipment business grew by 32.8 percent. Yes, no typographical error, no calculation error, here it is thirty-two point eight percent. And it is not a nascent market that we are talking about, it is the biggest contributor to the revenue of the total equipment business with a share of almost 72.4 percent. But if you are still not impressed, here is a plain and simple fact. At that rate, it is not just the highest in the world in this business, it is almost double of our more progressive neighbor—China. For a change, in telecom, we are now truly saare jahan se accha. And that’s not a minister’s speech. It is the voice of facts.

For those, who are into this segment of the business would probably be not too surprised. This was a year when not only the new licensees of mobile and fixed services bought and deployed networks, Bharat Sanchar Nigam Ltd, also got aggressive and bought and deployed new technologies like CDMA, to show that it cannot afford to fall behind. The year was truly a year of network deployment.

Continuing with facts, the total communication business market was worth Rs 37,229.41 crore in the year, recording a growth of 8.35 percent, despite an impressive 39 percent growth in mobile business. The total equipment market grew by a solid 22.3 percent to reach an estimated Rs 20,457.91 crore. And the total professional services (telecom software and network integration) market reached a size of Rs 5,382.35 crore—a growth of about 19.1 percent.

The combined revenue of V&D100 companies reached a total of Rs 64,383.96 crore. Yes, if you add the figures of the three markets—communication services, equipment, and professional services together—it is about Rs 63,069.67, which is 13.41 percent higher than the corresponding figure for the previous year. Though this figure logically should have been more than the V&D100 combined turnover because some non-V&D100 companies also do contribute to the business, the reason why this figure is smaller is because in the ranking based on sales, we take into account whatever is billed—the gross revenue, while in the market size we ensure that there is no double counting. For example, if some Hyundai system is sold by HFCL to BSNL, in the V&D 100 ranking you will find the figures in both the companies revenue, but in the market size, it is counted just once, not twice.

There are two clarifications we need to give you about last year’s figures.

One, because of market changes, we have added and deleted a few segments from the total industry size. For example, we have added storage equipment to this year’s enterprise data equipment figures. But while calculating growth, we have ensured that we have added last year’s storage industry figures to last year’s networking equipment figures and have calculated growth accordingly. Similarly, last year we had a combined figure for VSAT equipment and services. This year, we have separated them, thanks to the changing nature of how business is being done. While calculating growth, however, we have compared last year’s equipment with this year’s equipment business and last year’s services business with this year’s services business. Also, some segments, like paging, we have dropped from segment analysis section (for obvious reasons) but have calculated the revenue and added them to the total communication services market size. On the other hand, the segments which are not strictly communication business but are extremely important to the readers for the sheer information purpose, we have carried segment analyses, and calculated market size but have not added them to the overall market size, examples being power systems and customer interaction services.

Two, we have made some revisions in last year’s figures in a few segments like cellular services and T&M. In T&M, the revision is due to the fact that last year, we took all network test equipment including those used for enterprise networks. This year, we have kept it to telecom test equipment.

But, the table The Indian Telecom Industry 2001-02 at a Glance gives you the growth and last year’s revised figures. That is what our final figures are.

With network deployment finally picking up, this year, all eyes will be on services. This year, the communication services should be more affordable and available. That means availability of fixed lines as and when you want. That means more affordable mobile services. That means more useful value-added services. Ideally, all of it.

The year that went by was the year of infrastructure. Hopefully, we should be able to call the year 2002-03, the year of services.

V&D100 Companies: Who Moved Where Since Last Year