Bangladesh Telecommunications Company Limited (BTCL) recorded the highest loss in the last fiscal year.
The telecom company reported loss of Tk 336.44 crore as the state-owned firm’s struggle against the private mobile operators deepened.
A senior BTCL official said the company is incurring a loss of about Tk 30 crore every month, although the government has injected enough money into the company.
He went on to blame the losses on the repeated severing of its copper and optical fibre cables during development works on roads and drains. BTCL earns about Tk 40 crore each month but it has to spend about Tk 70 crore mainly for repairing the cables, he added. Another top official said the speed and signalling capacity of the cables decrease due to the repeated damages.
Of the net loss, which is an increase of 18.02% from the previous year, international call transmission accounted for Tk 116.86 crore.
The company’s revenue from local services declined 11% to Tk 281.28 crore as customers turn their backs on landline in droves.
BTCL also noted a 51.28 percent year-on-year rise in revenue to Tk 1,578.45 crore in fiscal 2015-16.
Its revenues from international incoming calls soared 14 times to Tk 583.17 crore after the company kept its call routing rate unchanged whereas the other international gateway operators hiked it.
Last year, the other IGW operators had increased the termination rate from 1.5 cents per minute to 2 cents, but BTCL kept it unchanged at 1.5 cents. The company also did well in the internet and data business segment: it saw 60 percent revenue growth to Tk 73.69 crore.
Currently, BTCL’s total landline connections stand at about seven lakh, down from 10 lakh in June 2011.
It had reported net profits of more than thousands of crores of taka during 2002-04, after which its profit has been on the decline for every year except for fiscal 2012-13.
It became a public limited company in 2008 and since then it could log in profits in only two years.
