Bharti Airtel Limited: World’s third largest and the largest teleservice provider in India

Bharti Airtel is the a pan-Indian mobile phone operator in true sense. It is the only telecommunications company that operates in all the twenty three circles in India. Headed by Sunil Mittal, Bharti Airtel, is the flagship company of the Bharti Group, one of the top Indian business houses. Bharti Group has a wide range of business. Recently, it signed a MoU with Wal-Mart. It also has a successful international venture with EL Rothschild Group. Under this venture, the company exports fresh vegetable products to Europe and USA. There is also the Bharti AXA Life Insurance Company Ltd., a joint venture with AXA, one of the famous financial protection and wealth management company.

Bharti Airtel:

It is one of the earliest mobile companies in India and the third largest mobile company in world and the largest mobile company in India. Currently, Bharti Airtel has more than 82 million subscribers. Singapore Telecommunications Limited aka Singtel owns 30% stake and Vodafone owns 4% stake in the company. In February 2007, Vodafone sold its Airtel stake to Airtel for $1.6 billion. A leading GSM service provider with a market share of 34.5% the company is also the largest wireless service provider.

Name: Bharti Airtel Limited.

Established: On July 07, 1995, (as a public limited company)

Number of shares: 1,898,101,604 (as of September 30, 2008).

Price of shares: Closing BSE share price = Rs. 636.65

Listings: Bombay Stock Exchange (BSE) and The National Stock Exchange of India (NSE).

Amount of capital: Rs. 1209 billion approximately (as of February 27, 2009).

Address: Bharti Airtel Limited (A Bharti Enterprise)

Qutab Ambience (at Qutab Minar), Mehrauli Road,

New Delhi - 110 030

Tel. No.: +91 11 4166 6000

Fax No.: +91 11 4166 6011/12

Services:

Bharti Airtel is one of the earliest mobile phone companies in India. Its business areas are divided into three segments: mobile services, telemedia services and enterprise services. The mobile service offers mobile and fixed wireless services all over India. It uses GSM technology. The Telemedia service operates in 95 Indian cities. It offers broadband and telephone services. The Enterprise services provides end-to-end telecom solution to corporate customers and provides national and international long distance services On October 2008, Bharti Airtel launched its Direct-to-Home Television service under the name, Airtel Digital TV.

Subscribers:

Bharti Airtel has more than 82 million customers (as of October 31, 2008). Out of these 82 million customers 80,199,747 are GSM subscribers and 2,549,043 are Telemedia Service subscribers who either subscribe for voice or broadband internet provided through DSL.

Chennai - 2,011,299

Delhi - 4,418,296

Mumbai - 2,718,885

Kolkata - 2,178,061

Maharashtra -

Gujarat - 3,690,661

Andhra Pradesh - 8,094,328

Karnataka - 8,995,538

Tamil Nadu - 5,392,458

Kerala - 2,013,424

Punjab - 3,554,406

Haryana - 1,170,378

Uttar Pradesh (West) - 2,071,723

Uttar Pradesh (East) - 5,124,948

Rajasthan - 6,032,480

Madhya Pradesh - 4,040,871

West Bengal & Andaman and Nicobar - 3,004,647

Himachal Pradesh - 887,594

Bihar - 6,419,357

Orissa - 2,496,123

Assam - 1,241,186

North Eastern States - 766,763

Jammu & Kashmir - 1,391,606

Network:

Bharti Airtel has operations all over India. The company owns and manages telephone infrastructures through its subsidiary Bharti Infratel Limited which owns 42% of Indus Towers Limited. It also has a submarine cable landing station at Chennai which connects Chennai and Singapore.

Airtel in Sri Lanka:

In December 2008, Bharti Airtel extended its business in Sri Lanka. The company started to offer third generation mobile phone services in association with Singtel. Singtel is the leading cellular service operator in Asia. The new service is known as Airtel Lanka. Headquartered at Colombo, it started operation on January 12, 2009. The company offered same tariffs for peak and off-peak hours, unconditional free incoming calls, uniform call charges to any network and 50% lower charges on roaming in India.

Black Berry and iPhone 3G:

Bharti-Televentures Limited, a subsidiary of Bharti Airtel made a joint venture deal with famous mobile phone maker Research In Motion (RIM). In October 2004, Bharti Airtel announced to launch BlackBerry Wireless Solution. In addition, Apple iPhone, the most popular smart phone in the world, is now currently available in India through Airtel and Vodafone.

Trivia:

• Bharti Airtel launched world’s first online Windows-based Online Desktop through Airtel broadband. The desktop system has been created by Microsoft and Nivio. Thorough this service, subscriber will be able to access a secure online desktop from anywhere. Subscribers would also be able to rent software per month. For Rs. 99 they would get 5 GB online storage. They would also get the ‘Retail Pack’ for Rs. 199 which contains 5GB online storage space, free Anti Virus protection, Windows-based operation system, automatic backup. For Rs. 399 and Rs. 699 per month they would get a Windows based operating system and MS Office.

• In July 2008, Bharti Airtel launched mChek, a mobile bill payment and prepaid recharge system. The service also included insurance premium payments for ICICI Prudential, payments for the Delhi-Gurgaon toll plaza, payments at eCommerce websites such as Indiatimes shopping, Yatra.com,Futurebazaar.com, SIFYMall.com, HomeShop18.com, movie ticketing sites like BookMyShow.com, MakeMyTrip.com and Yatra.com and redBus.in for bus ticket booking. On January 20, 2009, Bharti Airtel announced that its mChek subscriber base crossed more than one million.

• On January 19, 2009 Bharti Airtel launched its internet television, Airtel Digital TV. On that same day, it also launched “Triple Play Advantage.” It comes with telephony, broadband and Entertainment services to subscribers. The service was launched in Delhi, Gurgaon and Noida.

• In the fourth quarter of the Fiscal year 2006-07 Bharti Airtel added the highest number of customers;5.3 million. In that same year, it also added the highest number of net customers; 18 million.

• In May 2008, news came out that Bharti Airtel was looking into buying the South African telecom company MTN Group which has operations in 21 countries in Africa and the Middle East. According to the report of The Financial Times, Bharti was planning to pay $45 billion to gain 100% stake in MTN which would make it the largest overseas acquisition ever by any Indian business organization but things did not work out because in the negotiation table, MTN almost wanted to make Bharti a subsidiary of the new company.

• Bharti Airtel and its chairman and managing director, Sunil Bharti Mittal won many awards and recognitions. In 2007, Sunil Bharti Mittal won Padma Bhushan the highest Indian civilian decoration. Bharti Airtel was named third largest Wireless Operator in the world, largest private Integrated Telecom company in India, largest wireless operator in India and the largest private fixed line operator in India.

(This entry was first published in February 2009. Because of a technical problem, the entry had to be deleted and I am reposting again now.)

Related articles:

Bharti Airtel- official website

Wikipedia- Bharti Airtel