In 1999-00, Advanced Radio Masts (ARM) Ltd did business worth Rs 175 crore and a net profit of Rs 16 crore. Majority of its business came from transmission equipment—Rs 65.10 crore. JFTC and optical fibre brought revenues worth Rs 40 crore, paging and radio infrastructure fetched Rs 20 crore and from services came Rs 24 crore. ARM’s strength include an established infrastructure for R&D, production and focus; its positioning as a turnkey solution provider for all carrier class services; and its having the largest range of communication hardware and software products amongst Indian manufacturers.

Its major orders were the Costa corridor backbone network of Tata Cellular covering 21 sites and backbone network for Srinivas Celcom in Tamil Nadu. It also did a point-to-multipoint TDM/TDMA network for VSNL covering five sites, VSAT network covering 700 stations for the Highway Automation System (HAS) SPARSH project, fibre optic project for DRDO, Bharti, and Tata Teleservices, besides wireless and wireline access network for Satyam Infoway, among others. The company has silently emerged as a total solutions provider.

Its strength of offering innovative and cost-effective solutions and integration of the in-house developed products with hardware/software products from the strategic tie-up partners will help in a big way. The two key markets that will give it fillip in the next decade are telecom software development activity for domestic and international markets and the ISP and web-services arena.