Sistema Shyam to invest $1 bn in India

PANAJI - Sistema Shyam Teleservices, promoter of the MTS mobile service brand, will invest around $1 billion in its India operations over the next one year, a company official said Wednesday.

“We have already invested $1.5 billion in India and will be investing $2.5 billion in all within the next one year,” V.K. Cherian, director, corporate communications, told reporters here.

Sistema Shyam, a joint venture between Russia-based Sistema and India’s Shyam group, has a license to provide mobile telephony services in 22 circles across the country.

Cherian, who was here to announce the launch of MTS telecom services in Goa, said the company would soon cover all the major telecom circles.

“MTS has a subscriber base of nearly 4.5 million in India as of May 2010, despite being a late entrant into the sector,” he said.

Stating that MTS was aiming at a 20 per cent market share as far as data service was concerned, the firm’s chief information officer Rajeev Batra said the services now provided by MTS matched those which would be offered on the 3G platform and that the CDMA-oriented MTS had no intention of switching over to GSM technology.

“We are already offering high quality services like live TV streaming. At the current bandwidth we are providing, we are comfortable with CDMA. We do not see the need to switch to GSM,” Batra said.