It has been a fairly healthy quarter for the company. What were the growth drivers for you?

RailTel posted its highest ever consolidated income of Rs 1411 crores. This is a growth of 21% for the previous year’s growth which was Rs 1186 crores, which also was a maximum growth till last year. We have improved our performances last year by growing by 21%. Our profit before tax has been Rs 197 crores and profit after tax Rs 142 cr. As far as the quarter is concerned, in the fourth quarter, we posted our total income of Rs 440 cr which was a 5% increase over the preceding quarter and an 8% increase on the year on year basis.How do you see the operational performance shaping up? What is the outlook on margins going forward?

A lot of overall things are increasing but there is an emphasis on digital transformation in each and every sector. The digital India initiatives of the Government of India focuses on companies, creation of digital infrastructure, delivery of services digitally and increase in digital literacy so we are into all these sectors. The Indian telecom sector has become the world’s second-largest telecom sector in terms of subscribers, the number of connected devices increasing, the internet of things is unfolding newer streams of revenue for us.

We are in the field of railways, healthcare, education. Railways have always been an ambitious plan. Railways are going in for the high-speed communication corridor all along the railway tracks which is LTE or 4G based so that is already sanctioned for 35,000 route kilometres at a cost of Rs 7000 cr so we will certainly have a role to play in that. It is a big project so we certainly will get a pie of it and similarly is the education and the health sector.

The outlays are increasing both by the central government as well as the state governments. We have started implementing hospital management information systems for the railways. We are also doing telemedicine and teleconsultation project for the government of Karnataka. So in all these sectors, we feel a big scope is there so the cost may be increasing. The margins that way may come down but that will be compensated by the volumes.

What projections do you have for your overall telecom revenue?

If I take last year telecom revenue that is this year which has just ended in 2021, our telecom services growth was 19%. This was in spite of the tariffs having being lowered but since the volumes had increased these revenues have increased tremendously. We have created the world’s largest wifi, integrated wifi network. We are present at 6020 plus railway stations today. 5000 of them are in the rural areas. Today there is a huge digital divide between the urban and the rural areas. The demand for both wired and wireless, broadband services in rural areas is tremendous. We are penetrating that.

I see huge growth and out of these 6020, about 5000 are in the rural areas. We have high capacities there for which we are able to deliver to the rural areas. Six lakh villages are to be provided with broadband services in the next few years. Further in December 2020, the cabinet has approved a proposal by DOT for the setting up of public wifi network by the PDOAs. We have already registered ourselves as a PDOA with the department of telecommunication and we are already ready with the PM-WANI app and this telecom sector will grow and expand tremendously and similarly for connecting the educational institutions in the education sector. We connected about 729 educational institutions on our network and still, there is a lot of demand all over the country for this.

What is your outlook on the project work services revenues? How do you see them shaping up? Do you think it will generate healthy profitability as a segment?

If I talk about project income, it has grown by 31% during last year and the contribution to our portal income was 35% to 40%. The growth you are seeing in our total income will continue to be there because as railways have such big projects coming in like a train, TCAS system, collision avoidance system, they have to install over 35,000 route kilometres in the country. These projects will continue to come and continue to grow.

As our telecom services will grow so we have to be very well prepared to render all these telecom services. We are investing in our expansion, upgrading our telecom network, data centres – both these things are being taken out simultaneously. We have invested about Rs 85 cr last year and this year coming forward we have kept our provision of about Rs 115 cr for this year. So all this managed from our own internal accruals. We are not depending upon borrowings so with this we plan to expand further as the requirement goes into the telecom services sector.