Sunil Mittal Chairman of Bharti Enterprises said that India has emerged as a dominant player in one field—telecommunications. He further added that the company clocked a subscription base of 100 million customers, which is a great reason to rejoice.
Commenting on the growth that has taken place in the telecommunication sector in the recent past, Mittal said, “We have 1.5 billion minutes a day and I remember the time when we used to talk about one million minutes on the network. So, indeed this story has come a long way. I also believe that this is not only a celebration for Bharti or Airtel or for the telecom community; it is a celebration for this country.”
“For the first time, very clearly, India has emerged as a dominant player in one field and that is telecommunications,” he added.
Mittal said, “I have no doubt that in the next five to seven years, India will cross several more hundred million customers. There will be other customers that follow this number of 100 million. Overall, some estimates suggest that we should be looking at 75% of tele-density in not too distant a future and that means more like 800-850 million customers. Therefore, our resolve is to now start the clock one more time and say, how do we get to our next 100 million customers?”
Commenting on the co-operation received from the partners, Mittal said, “We have had in this journey many partners who have been with us from time to time—British Telecom, Telecom Italia in particular. We started this journey with Vivendi of France. We have had Emtel of Mauritius, which is a tiny operator to some of the largest operators in the world.”
Talking on Bharti’s acquisitions, he said, “We had acquisitions within the country where we acquired networks from Millicom, Telia and some other international companies. I am also pleased that we today run the Kolkata operations that Simon launched in India and in some sense stole the march over us by a few days by launching, as we believe, a half-cooked network. But he got the better of us on that and had the first call. However, we were also determined to make Bharti that company that made the first call in India. So, we did go and acquire that company to establish our claim that we were the first company to make the first call.”
Honoured to lead Bharti, Mittal said, “I am deeply honoured that I have had the chance to lead such a wonderful management team, which to my mind is unparalleled, anywhere, not only in this region but in the world. I meet leaders from telecom companies across the globe and I can tell you the team that leads Airtel today is next to no other company in the world. It is the finest company in the world leading this telecom.”
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