American telecom major Motorola has stayed away from the mega tender floated by state-owned Bharat Sanchar Nigam (BSNL) for adding another 93 million GSM (global systems for mobile communications) lines.

All other major telecom vendors across the world — Ericsson, Nokia, Alcatel, Nortel, Huawei and ZTE — put in their technical bids on Wednesday, which was the deadline set by BSNL.

The size of the tender, for both 2G and 3G lines, is being estimated to be in the range of $8 billion to $9 billion.

After the technical bids of these six firms are evaluated by BSNL, they can put in their financial bids.

BSNL CMD Kuldeep Goyal said the financial bids could be invited by the end of this year or early next year.

Motorola’s decision to not bid for BSNL’s 93-million line tender is being widely seen as a repurcussion of its experience of 2006, when it was technically disqualified by the PSU telco from participating in the financial bid process.

A Motorola official said the decision to stay off the bidding process are a business decision due the price and rates. “BSNL remains a key customer,” the official said.

Goyal told DNA Money he was not aware of the reason as to why Motorola had not bid for the tender this time. BSNL officials pointed out that BSNL’s relations with Motorola were cordial, and that there’s no bar on the American firm in relation to participation in BSNL tenders.

It is believed that this time round, the per-line cost will be significantly lower than $100.
In the previous GSM tender, floated in 2006, Ericsson was the lowest successful bidder at $107 per line. Nokia was second at $177. Motorola and ZTE were technically disqualified.

The per-line cost was later slashed to around $90, and the size of the 45-million tender was reduced to half. While Ericsson supplied the equipment at that cost, Nokia refused to match that price.

This forced BSNL to float another tender of 93 million GSM lines a few months ago. The technical bids were submitted by the vendors and opened by BSNL on Wednesday.

On the infrastructure side, 10 firms including GTL, Acme, Estel, TVS Interconnect, Nextra and KEC International, put in their bids. The IT (information technology) bids will be opened on September 30.

Currently, Bharti has the largest GSM subscriber base in the country followed by Vodafone Essar and BSNL.

Source:dnaindia