Q: The other major concern is that there is a big rate war going on in the voice segment in India which could be debilitating for your margins. Could you take us through what exactly is your take on the voice segment?

A: Its person-to-person voice calls where you have seen pulse billing and price was going down to 1 paise per second—that does not affect us because if you look at value-added servicing pricing that has remained unchanged in the last four-five years. Do we expect that to continue going forward? No. I expect it to fall a bit. But the volume increase that we have seen is going to make up more for the price decline. The price war that has been going on in the core telecom business works extremely well for us because each of the telecom operators is looking at value added services even more eagerly and are willing to market and promote every new service that we can think of. So they are putting more pressure on us to launch more services, pump out new products, which is great for us.

Q: Your margins came down quite significantly in the current quarter. As you do initial expenditure or the initial investments in some of the newer deals like with Vodafone and Telefonica, do you expect margins to remain subdued for a couple of quarters?

A: The question I keep asking ourselves is whether we were a public or private company would we do anything differently and my belief is I am going to do what is right for the business. As I told you we are seeing unlimited demand overseas. So we are investing as much as we can. We don’t want margins to drop dramatically but we will ensure that margins are realistic and reasonable. At the same time we will invest to the fullest extent possible to capture market share overseas.

Q: You are saying that in the near-term margins might be affected but you will try and smoothen it out a bit?

A: Yes we are going to try and smoothen it out. It’s a question of investment for growth. If you are running a company that has huge upside growth potential and you see all these opportunities with overseas customers—they are not going to wait for you if you do not execute. So I am going to go head and capture those slots for eg if I look at Telefonica, it’s a seven year contract for 13 countries and covering 130 million subscribers. Once I have locked in that real estate, I am set for seven years and if I can do that with Vodafone Australia, Egypt, New Zealand, Czechoslovakia, Hungary and UK, I am going to go ahead and do, it’s all good for the business.

Q: There was some talk about you going in for a global listing and also raising some capital. Can you give us some details on that?

A: We have thought about whether we should list overseas on Nasdaq in particular. We are in no rush to do that. We will do it if it makes sense to increase the visibility in those markets for us. In terms of raising capital, we have debated about that. We have enough money on our balance sheet right now but we may decide to go in for additional capital if we see some more of these large Vodafone- and Telefonica-type deals coming through because that will help us accelerate signing up these customers.

Q: You are saying that the purpose of this listing is more for visibility and not necessarily a need to raise equity capital at this point?

A: Absolutely. The way I look at it (a) in the old days there was a reason to list overseas because you get a premium in terms of multiples or so. I don’t think that’s the case any more. We do not need to list for that. We have enough awareness amongst all the large financial funds. Quite frankly there isn’t enough liquidity in the stock to absorb the amount of interest that we have had. But if we have to do business particularly in the United States and in Europe to a much larger extent, the visibility achieved from listing on one of those exchanges will be good for us. So it’s going to be done more for customers and less for liquidity.