The Indian Oil Corporation on Tuesday signed a memorandum of collaboration with the Bharat Sanchar Nigam Ltd to cross-sell their products and services.

The MoC was signed by IOC chairman M S Ramachandran and BSNL chairman and managing director Prithipal Singh, in New Delhi.

Speaking on the occasion, Ramachandran said the collaboration was designed to leverage each other's infrastructure so as to deliver better products and services to their customers.

Under the terms of the MoC, IOC and BSNL would develop exclusive loyalty programmes to retain and expand their customer base.

BSNL would have the opportunity to set up and offer communication business centres at attractive rates to customers at the IOC petrol stations. IOC's LPG distributorship network would be engaged by BSNL for selling products like recharge coupons, Sancharnet cards, as well as BSNL's bill collection.

"While IOC will explore to utilise BSNL's expertise to build connectivity between its widely spread petrol stations, supply points and offices, BSNL will also have the opportunity to utilise IOC's large network of petrol stations to sell their various products," Ramachandran said.

IOC would also exploit BSNL's capabilities for creating a 'truck-tracking system' for its PowerPlus fleet card customers, he said.

Singh said BSNL would explore the possibility of taking telecom bandwidth from IOC for its mobile telephony rollout particularly in the north-eastern region.

IOC, which has a vast network of optical fibre cable laid along its product and crude oil pipelines, has offered excess bandwidth capacity to BSNL.