After launching its private 5G global centre of excellence last month, Tata Communications is now ready with its 5G offerings. Having seen interest from some enterprises for its 5G offerings, the company believes that the penetration of 5G will speed up as clients start realising the potential of good return on investments from it.

“We are ready with our POCs (proof of concepts of 5G solutions), we are ready with our use cases. It (the penetration of 5G) also (depends on) the customer organisations maturity to adopt and our ability to also solution them and demonstrate a good ROI (return on investments) for the customer in order to facilitate and speed up their own decision making,” Kabir Ahmed Shakir, chief financial officer of Tata Communications told FE in an interaction.

The Tata Group company offers end-to-end connectivity solutions to enterprises and sees 5G as a medium to boost its current portfolio of offerings spread across data platforms and services, next generation connectivity, internet of things, media and entertainment services, among other key verticals.

Also Read: UltraTech Q2 net profit falls 42% to Rs 756 crore

“Our focus is not that I am going to take 5G as a standalone but look at it from the lens of business verticals that we are actually driving, and 5G will only accelerate and help that,” Shakir said.

According to Shakir, while there will be early adopters of the new 5G technology, but some enterprises would want to wait until there is a demonstrated successful usecase. “We have a clear strategy…as to what are the kind of solutions that we would like to offer, we would like to pitch them as very high ROI solutions that we would like to offer to our customers,” he said, adding that the company has developed over 80 usecases of 5G in various segments.

Like telecom operators and other information technology majors, Tata Communications is also banking on the private 5G network opportunity through which it will be able to set up complete network for the enterprises inside their campuses. With the shift to Industry 4.0, there will be automated processes across industries and a private 5G network will help the enterprise to own their network and leverage true potential of the technology without any interference from public networks.

In order to provide the private 5G services, Tata Communications does not intend to buy spectrum from the government but use the spectrum acquired by the enterprises either on lease from the telecom operators or directly from the government, once that option is available to them.

“I think the enterprises today are being encouraged by the government to buy spectrum from them and then they can choose the operator. We have not participated in the auction and therefore our intention is not to buy spectrum,” Shakir said.

For its 5G solutions, the company is not looking only India as a market but also tapping other geographies to grow its business. Tata Communications currently has about 43% revenue contribution from India, followed by 27% from America, 13.5% from Europe, 10.6% from Asia Pacific region, and 6% from Middle East and North Africa region.

In the September quarter, the company reported a 25% on year growth in consolidated net profit to Rs 532 crore, and its revenue from operations rose 6.2% on year to Rs 4,431 crore. Tata Communications is bullish on its data services segment, which contributes a significant chunk to its revenue.

When asked about the impact of recession on its business, Shakir said the company is yet to see any negative impact and will be cautious. According to him, no company is going to stop its investment into digital transformation in pursuit for growth, which is in line with solutions offered by Tata Communications.