The Chennai cellular circle has been valued at Rs 250 crore and Bharti Enterprises has picked up 51 per cent stake, which includes 10.5 per cent held by DSS Enterprises.

The company is also in the process of acquiring the balance stake in SkyCell which is held equally by Bellsouth and Millicom of the US. Bharti Enterprises runs cellular and basic services under the Airtel brand in Delhi, HP and Madhya Pradesh. Repeated attempts to contact the Bharti Enterprises chairman Sunil Mittal proved futile. Mittal had earlier told The Financial Express that the deal with Crompton Greaves was on and hoped to finalise it soon.

Sources close to the Thapar Group company, Crompton Greaves, felt that on the back of a net gain of Rs 75 crore, the company islikely to consider a special dividend for its shareholders. The company had spent close to Rs 25.2 crore on the project at the time of its commissioning in 1994.

The deal would now fetch Crompton Greaves close to Rs 100 crore, which puts an end to sustained speculation regarding the sale, including recent reports about Escorts - First Pacific joint venture, Escotel Mobile Communications outwitting other bidders for the Crompton stake.

Sensing some development in the company, Crompton Greaves stock in the past few sessions has seen a rise in its valuations coupled with a rise in trading volumes. The company' stock has risen from Rs 51 to Rs 66 before dropping marginally to Rs 62 on Friday last.

The cashflow from the sale of the cellular licence would help the company prepay its huge high cost outstanding loans and, thus, reduce the interest outgo. The company's outstanding secured and unsecured debt as on March 1999 stood at Rs 513 crore and Rs 155 crore. As a result, the interest outgo for the yearended March 1998 and 1999 stood at Rs 66.18 crore and Rs 79.07 crore. The interest cost saving would directly boost the bottomline.

The one-time payment would be reflected as other income in the forthcoming results and would help the company turnaround as it reported losses of close to Rs 36 crore for the six months ended September 1999. The bidders for the Chennai cellular license included BPL Mobile and Sivasankaran of Srinivas Cellcom.