For the first time since 2001, employees of Hindustan Teleprinters Limited (HTL) had an occasion to celebrate early this October. A special lunch was prepared at the staff canteen in its Guindy premises to celebrate the company’s success in clinching a Rs 97-crore order from Bharat Sanchar Nigam Limited to supply Integrated Fixed Wireless Terminals, for which production was to commence ‘at the earliest’.

The celebration is ironic—the company has always been a major supplier to government telecom companies, yet this is the first large deal it has bagged in the last six years after the government sold off 74 per cent of its stake in HTL. Set up in 1961, when Jawaharlal Nehru was Prime Minister and K Kamraj the Tamil Nadu Chief Minister, HTL had a virtual monopoly in manufacturing telecom products and tele-printers till 1975.

Ater teleprinters went out of fashion, the company decided to diversify into the fields of digital switching, transmission, access and data products. By the time the Centre decided to offload a majority stake in the company, the company’s profits were a mere Rs 2 crore (2000-01).

Himachal Futuristic Communications Limited (HFCL) paid Rs 55 crore for a majority stake and took over in October 2001 in the hope of exploiting HTL’s synergies with its own telecom business.

However, unlike a private company’s takeover, where a full due diligence is done on the target company’s operations, PSU buyers have to go by gut feeling and the financial numbers provided by the Government. An unpleasant surprise awaited HFCL—HTL’s books were hardly reliable, orders from its big PSU buyers stopped and by March 2007, the company had accumulated losses of Rs 240 crore. And this is why the latest BSNL order comes as a boost to the company and staff’s morale in the nick of time.

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