Uninor Bihar-Jharkhand circle business head Navarun Sen and managing director Sigve Brekke (in screen) at the video-conferencing session in Patna on Wednesday. Picture by Jai Prakash

Patna, Feb. 8: Telecom service provider Uninor and its associate Telenor Group today claimed that they would explore every legal option possible to protect their lawful investment in India.

The Supreme Court on February 2 cancelled 122 licences for 2G mobile telephone services granted in 2008 by then telecom minister A. Raja, and also imposed a fine of Rs 5 crore each on three companies that had offloaded shares after bagging the licences.

Besides Uninor (joint venture between Unitech and Telenor of Norway), Loop Telecom, Sistema Shyam (joint venture between Shyam and Sistema of Russia), Etisalat DB (joint venture between Swan and Etisalat of UAE), S Tel, Videocon, Tata and Idea are set to lose their accounts because of the judgment.

Uninor, however, has decided to seek a review of the judgment. During a videoconference session with journalists, Sigve Brekke, the managing director of Uninor, admitted that the licence of his company would surely be cancelled after four months, according to the ruling of the apex court. However, he said the company has kept options open to file a review petition against the judgment.

“As a foreign investor, we have to respect the law of the land but we may file a review petition against the judgment of the Supreme Court,” said Brekke.

He added that the company has recorded the highest subscriber addition during the past weekend. “The company has responded to the licence ruling by adding three lakh customers in one weekend. This is the highest weekend subscriber addition ever for Uninor,” claimed a press statement released by the company today.

Asked about the strategies Uninor might adopt to deal with the situation, Brekke said: “We want to make sure that our message of remaining strong in the market is being fully communicated to all our employees, trade partners and stakeholders. We are trying to reach to our subscribers in order to make sure that they do not panic after the judgment. Moreover, we are going to formulate new promotional strategies, including increased advertisement and a lot of aggressive marketing.”

Brekke also praised the Norway government for the support it had received. “We appreciate the support from the Norwegian government. Their message is that they want Telenor Group to remain in India and compete,” said Brekke.