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Telenor will offer its prospective partner 26 per cent stake in a new company that will be formed in India, and is clear that the associate will play no role in running the telecom operations.
“We are not looking for anyone who is looking at being involved in operations,” Sigve Brekke, Managing Director, Uninor, said, adding that Telenor will hold 74 per cent stake. "The new partner will definitely not be a telecom or real-estate company,”he said.
Asked whether it will bid for 2G spectrum, he said that Uninor was studying the details of the memorandum released earlier this week. “We need to clear the partner issue before the auction and will make an announcement on the new partner before October,” he said.
The separation of the joint venture company’s current partners – Telenor and Unitech – is under way, Brekke said, adding that processes to sign up with a new partner and then start a new company and roll all the assets into it, will follow.
Mass market focus
Speaking on plans for the Indian market, Brekke said Uninor will focus on the mass market, and move into post paid services only after a critical mass of six to seven crore customers is built. Its current customer base stands at four crore, and the company expects to break even in the first half of next year.
“We are surprised as we never thought we could build such a cost effective machine,” Brekke said, and added that the lessons learnt in India’s highly cost competitive culture could be taken to other countries.
In Pune, the company kicked off its new 'Sabse Sasta' initiative. “We want to be seen as the cheapest,” he said. The campaign will be taken across the nine circles in which it is focusing. In the four circles in which it is scaling down operations with effect from September 1, Uninor’s customer base will come down to 10 lakh from 40 lakh.
To grow its India business, the company is adding 675 new cell sites to its existing 3,076 sites across India, is enhancing its retail network and plans to go into smaller towns and villages.
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