Skipper Limited has secured fresh new orders valuing Rs 25.70 billion from Bharat Sanchar Nigam Limited (BSNL). The contract has been awarded by BSNL for the supply and erection of ground based telecom towers, infrastructure as a service provider (IaaSP) for supply, installation of infrastructure items and subsequent operation and maintenance (O&M) for five years extendable to five more years in the uncovered villages of India under 4G saturation projects.
The total contract value awarded to Skipper under these projects is approximately Rs. 25.7 billion to be executed under capital expenditure (capex) and operations expenditure (opex) model over five years. The works are to be executed in the states of Rajasthan and Orissa.
The telecom sites will be set up to provide 4G connectivity as part of the 4G saturation projects in areas still uncovered with any sort of mobile communication or are currently having only 2G/3G connectivity. The project will be executed using the home-grown 4G stack and will be funded through Government of India Universal Service Obligation Fund (USOF), which is a Rs 550 billion strong cash reserves meant for providing connectivity in rural and remote areas.
Commenting on the announcement, Sajan Kumar Bansal, managing director, Skipper Limited, said, “We are glad that we are playing a crucial role and contributing our bit towards India’s infrastructure development and proud to be part of government vision to provide mobile connectivity in rural areas. The project will promote the delivery of various e- governance services, banking services, tele-medicine, tele-education etc through mobile broadband and promote employment in rural areas. Our company is the largest manufacturer of telecom tower in India, backed by our forte in executing projects for the telecom sector; this is another significant win for us. Our large engineering capacity to support captive manufacturing of telecom structures and decades of experience in building tower sites on turnkey basis will vastly complement the execution of this prestigious project and will establish our company as a front runner in this domain. Going forward, the marketplace looks exciting and ripe with opportunities and the company has a positive outlook based on strong traction in domestic telecom on account of future 4G up-gradation and 5G rollout to support high bandwith usage requirement which will draw more infrastructural capex into the sector. Additionally we are witnessing strong traction in power transmission and distribution and polymer market segments”.
