Bharti Airtel Crosses 100 Million Subscriber Base

[vvinayakpai 26]

THE HINDU

Online edition of India's National Newspaper

Saturday, May 16, 2009

Bharti Airtel subscriber base crosses 10-crore

Special Correspondent

To roll-out one-lakh base station sites by year-end

MILESTONE: Sunil Bharti Mittal (left), Chairman and CEO, Bharti Enterprises with partners and board members in New Delhi on Friday.

NEW DELHI: Bharti Airtel on Friday said it has become the first service provider to cross 10-crore subscribe base. Making this announcement here, Bharti Enterprises Chairman and Group CEO Sunil Mittal asked the government to announce a stable spectrum regime to boost growth of the telecom sector.

With 10-crore subscribers, Airtel has become the third largest single country mobile services operator in the world and sixth largest integrated telecom company globally. After having started its service in 1995 as Bharti Tele-Ventures, the company crossed the 7.5-crore customer mark in August 2008 and 5-crore mark in October 2007, making it one of the fastest growing telecom company in the world. The first 2.5-crore subscribers were achieved in July 2006.

“The Indian telecom sector, seen as providing the most affordable services in the world, has grown by leaps and bounds in the last decade. We are proud to have led the telecom revolution that made a positive impact on the lives of people in every corner of the country as well as the Indian economy,” Mr. Mittal added.

Targeting 20-crore subscribers in the next 2-3 years, Airtel will be undertaking a series of network augmentation and customer service initiatives. “We will roll-out over one-lakh base station sites by this year-end to set up wider and deeper network coverage across the country and establish a state-of-the-art customer service management centre, besides setting up one-lakh Airtel service centres in rural areas by March 2010,” he said.

Airtel at present has 25 per cent subscriber share and 30 per cent market share in terms of revenue. It is only behind two Chinese operators in terms of subscriber size measured within a country.

Edited May 16, 2009 by vvinayakpai

[KumaarShah 143]

No celebrations? No offers to customers? Very bad of airtel to ignore customers who have taken them there.... Maybe it will come shortly...or maybe not.... Lets wait and watch....

[savramesh 37]

Bharti Airtel Ltd expects to add another 100 m users

Sify business

2009-05-16 13:06:00

New Delhi: Bharti Airtel Limited chairman Sunil Mittal expects to add another 100 million users to its kitty in the coming years.

Mittal said India had emerged as a dominant player in the field of telecommunications.

"For the first time, India has emerged as a dominant player in one field and that is telecommunications. I have no doubt of going forwards in next five to seven years. India would cross several more 100 million customers. There would be other countries that would follow this number of 100 million. Overall some estimates suggest that we should be looking at 75 per cent of the tele-density and that means 800-750 million customers. Therefore our resolve to start the clock one more time and say how we get to our next 100 million customers," said Mittal.

More telecom news

60 per cent of the company's subscriber base is in the rural areas, which was once considered unviable.

India has second-largest telecom user base in the world after China and ahead of the US. Now, it has 429.72 million telecom subscribers, both in the wireless and mobile segments, with a record growth of 59.48 per cent last fiscal.

[shilpi 0]

i am agree with you i m 8 yrs old customer of bharti but it never give any offer to me so it should be for old custmers

[savramesh 37]

Airtel user base swells by 2.8 mn in April

Economic Times

2 Jun 2009, 0142 hrs IST

NEW DELHI: Leading GSM operators Bharti Airtel and Vodafone Essar have added 2.8 million and 2.7 million subscribers in April, continuing their respective growth momentum. The second-largest mobile operator Reliance Communications added just over 2-million subscribers last month, according to data released by telecom regulator Trai on Monday.

GSM operator Aircel added about 1.1 million new subscribers in April taking its total subscriber base to 19.5 million. Tata Teleservices, a CDMA operator, added about 0.6 million new users in the given month taking its subscriber base to 35.7 million. Idea Cellular and Spice Communications together added a notch over 1-million subscribers in April. State-owned telco MTNL added 47,045 new subscribers in April.

RCOM, the country’s largest telecom operator on CDMA technology platform, had launched GSM-based services in January with schemes providing free talk time up to Rs 900 and this resulted in its subscriber numbers surging between January-March. The free scheme was taken away by March-end, which resulted in subscriber additions falling in April.

RCOM had outperformed the industry in these three months, it added 5-million new users in January and over 3-million new subscribers in February and March. In comparison, the largest mobile operator, Bharti, added 2.7 million new users each in January and February 2009 and 2.8 million in March.

RCOM now has a mobile subscriber base of 74.8 million and Vodafone Essar's total subscriber base stands at 71.5 million, while Bharti Airtel leads with 96.7 million total subscribers. Vodafone Essar also saw a drop of about 0.07 million users in its monthly additions in April and the telco added just over 2.7-million subscribers as against 2.84 million in March.

With this, Bharti Airtel regained the number one position in terms of subscriber additions by a few thousand users as it increased its customer base by 2.8-million users in April.

In March 2009, Vodafone Essar had beaten Bharti Airtel in monthly subscriber additions for the first time. Trai also said that India's mobile base had crossed the 400-million mark in April, inching close to the target of 500-million users by 2010, set by the Department of Telecom (DoT).

The total wireless subscriber base now stands at 403.66 million, while the total telecom base, which includes that of landline is 441.47 million, Trai added. But, the number of new mobile connections added in April saw a 23% drop compared with 15.64 million new additions in the previous month.

[savramesh 37]

Bharti Airtel hopeful of 200-m user mark in 3 years

Business Line

Wednesday, Jun 03, 2009

Thrust on mobile entertainment and rural areas.

We are giving a huge thrust to music, games, movies and sports under mobile entertainment wherein we plan to be an end-to-end service provider. — Mr Atul Bindal

New Delhi, June 2 To keep its leadership position in the fastest growing mobile market, Bharti Airtel is embarking on a multi-pronged strategy, including a comprehensive customer retention programme, partnerships with companies that offer mobile entertainment and commerce services, domestic acquisitions and a thrust on driving growth in the rural areas.

In his first interview after taking over as the President of Bharti’s mobile business, Mr Atul Bindal, told Business Line, “I do not agree with those who say Indian mobile growth story is on the verge of getting over. We will reach the next hundred million subscribers by a combination of reaching out to the huge potential that exists in the rural areas, taking advantage of the untapped opportunity in large urban areas and possibly through the organic route which we will evaluate as when opportunities come by.”

Bharti crossed the 100-million mark in May and is hoping to reach the 200-million mark in another two-three years.

Number portability

Asked on the impact on Bharti of new players and introduction of mobile number portability (MNP), Mr Bindal said the company has put in place a customer life-cycle management system which will enable it to take customer services to the next level.

“At present most operators are looking at a few broad consumer segments to create offering and services around them. We are going to take this to the next level wherein Bharti will target micro segments of subscribers to offer customised services. For example, a subscriber who travels a lot to a particular country would like to get a special international roaming tariff. The system will allow us to target products based on the user’s behaviour rather than launch broad mass offerings,” Mr Bindal said.

He added that MNP is an opportunity for Bharti to acquire customers from other operators.

Mr Bindal reckons that mobile commerce and mobile entertainment are going to be big applications.

“Value added service the way we know today is going to change drastically. We are giving a huge thrust to music, games, movies and sports under mobile entertainment wherein we plan to be an end-to-end service provider. We will also enable application providers to use Bharti’s network as a conduit to reach our subscribers. In m-commerce, we are looking at the unbanked segment and micro-finance in a big way,” he said.

Asked if Bharti was open to tie-ups with companies such as Nokia, which also is launching an entertainment platform, Mr Bindal said that such partnerships were possible.

Acquisition plan

He also did not rule out the possibility of Bharti acquiring small companies offering value-added services or a technology that will add to its business model.

“Bharti has always been in favour of strategic partnerships and alliances as long as it offers a compelling value proposition to our customers,” Mr Bindal said.