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Tuesday, February 12, 2008

RELIANCE COMMUNICATIONS

Reliance Communications (RCOM) has a mobile telephony market share of 18 per cent and subscriber base of 38 million, which is rising by a million every month. And this should continue to rise as RCOM penetrates into smaller towns. 

What's more interesting is that despite concerns over declining, operating margins have improved to 42.2 per cent in Q2 FY08, thanks to the benefits of larger scale. 

This is expected to improve further if RCOM gets the go-ahead to operate an additional 15 GSM circles as 65 per cent of passive infrastructure such as telecom towers, is common to both GSM and CDMA technologies and the investments in its existing networks will be incremental. 

Additionally, it is the value unlocking in its subsidiaries that are likely to provide further triggers. 

In 2008, RCOM is likely to announce a stake sale and subsequently list its tower subsidiary, Reliance Telecom Infrastructure, list its submarine cable subsidiary, FLAG Telecom, hive off of its SEZ and BPO businesses and the launch IPTV and DTH services by the first quarter of 2008. 

Analysts estimate that a conservative sum-of-parts valuation based on FY09 numbers for RCOM comes to Rs 850-Rs 900 per share, which indicates an appreciation of 17-24 per cent from current levels.

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