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Until five years ago, they were shunned. Bankers would not lend them money. Big businessmen would squeeze them and revenue authorities would view them as dens of tax evasion. Today, it is a fad for bankers to woo them, for large products and services companies to create divisions for them and for policy-makers to...
Glitzy advertising and Big B as brand ambassador is all very well. But consumers who found worms in their chocolate had a bitter experience with Cadbury, says Sucheta Dalal
Remember the hullabaloo over the worms found in Cadbury’s chocolates a few years ago? Most of us forgot about it after superstar Amitabh Bachchan began to extol the virtues of celebrating with chocolates instead of...
Income growth of 111%, 178%, 140% and 121% over the past four quarters. That has been the performance of Spanco Telesystems. From just Rs25 crore in December 04, its revenues have grown to Rs136 crore in December 06. Started by Kapil Puri and Rajesh Chhabria in 1995, initially Spanco was manufacturing EPABX and analogue radio products. It has now evolved into one of the leading networking and systems integration solution companies in India. Spread over nine locations (Mumbai, Pune, Ahmedabad, Gurgaon, Kolkata, Bangalore, Hyderabad, Lucknow and Guwahati) with an employee strength of 3300, Spanco runs three divisions: telecom, international BPO and domestic call centres. It does telecom integration for multinationals, public sector units and the defence sector and has been awarded a unified call centre project by MTNL, Delhi. Currently, it runs the networked call centre for MTNL, including hardware and software at three locations in Mumbai.
Spanco has also clinched a 10-year contract for setting up, operating and maintaining call centres for the Indian Railways. The project is expected to generate around Rs800 crore to Rs900 crore during the period of the contract. Spanco is one of few pure call centres listed in India and handles domestic and international clients which is also uncommon. It has one of the best business models among companies in the call centre business. It has multiple revenue streams and its domestic call centre clients need to be supported by employees who speak either Hindi or a local language. They need not speak English -- this is a major advantage for Spanco. Getting a large number of English-speaking employees at reasonable wages is becoming a big handicap for call centre companies servicing foreign clients. In any case, Spanco is further diversifying its revenue stream, adding other skills and services. It has recently bought a controlling stake (51%) in Skandsoft Technologies Pvt. Ltd. engaged in radio frequency identification devices (RFID) solutions.
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