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Page Point breaks even despite recessionary trend
BV Mahalakshmi
Hyderabad: Despite the recession in the paging industry, Page Point Services (India) Ltd, a 100 per cent subsidiary of Himachal Futuristic Communications Ltd (HFCL), has recorded a positive growth in the last 13 months. Though he refused to part with the turnover figures, Mr Amit Reshamwala, head of the Hyderabad operations, said that the overall subscriber base had grown over twelve per cent in the last six months. The service has a subscriber base of 90,000 all over India, which operates from Mumbai, Hyderabad, Bangalore and Pune.The Hyderabad circle has 11,000 members to its share. Explaining the reason for the growth, Reshamwala said that because of its value-added services like intercity services paging, corporate Hotline service, Hotline escalator, E-page (India's first two-way e-mail and Internet paging service), despite a negative trend in the industry. According to Reshamwala, Page Point is the only company which was able to break even unlike other competitors in the industry. The company is looking beyond basic paging by offering value-added services and is targeting niche markets like small and medium scale enterprises, he said. As of now, the company has an 80 per cent market share of corporate services, which has churned out close to Rs 3-4 crore worth of business from Hyderabad and plans to increase it by at least 12-15 per cent in the current year. For giving more value-additions to its services, Page Point provides fax over Net through a strategic alliance with the US-based MacroFax.com, an Internet technology to deliverinternational faxes over the Net. MacroFax.com is the largest provider of fax over the Net and provides its services across Europe and US. Through this technology, the subscribers can use their fax machines and also a enjoy a 50 per cent savings on international faxes. According to a report by MacroFax.com, worldwide faxes are projected to increase by 64 per cent by 2002 and international fax transmissions is a $35 billion business. Apart from this, Page Point is also in talks with three companies for overseas call centres through which there is a growing revenue of 25 per cent growth on a month-to-month basis, Mr Amit added. Copyright © 2001 Indian Express Newspapers (Bombay) Ltd.
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