Maxis to pump Rs 22 billion in Aircel Cellular

Maxis Communications, Malaysia`s leading telecom service provider, plans to pump in RM 1.7 billion (Rs22 billion) in the current financial year into Aircel Cellular to support the existing and additional circles targeted by the company, reports The Economic Times.

Aircel, which currently has operations in the Chennai and Tamil Nadu telecom circles, has the funds required to expand its presence to an additional 10 circles by March 2007.

For the first time, Maxis has included Aircel`s financial results, in its first quarter results. It announced that the Indian company contributed a pre-tax profit of RM 16 million to the group. Maxis said that it had close to 11 million customers, of which Aircel contributed 2.6 million. Maxis also added that the capital for these investment would be raised at Aircel`s level.

CEO Dato Jamaludin Ibrahim said, "India`s subscriber growth potential is tremendous, with the number of customers expected to grow from over 75 million in 2005 to at least 175 million by 2008. This robust growth is reflected in Aircel`s financial results and saw the company contributing a pre-tax profit of $43.6 lakh to the group in Q1 2006 when we included Aircel`s results for the first time.

Apart from Chennai and Tamil Nadu, Aircel currently is scaling up its operations in the West Bengal, Orissa, Assam, North East, and Jammu & Kashmir circles. It is also expected to launch operations in Bihar and Himachal Pradesh in the next couple of months, while services in the Madhya Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh (E), and Uttar Pradesh (W) circles are expected to be available by March 2007.