Bharti Airtel is one of Asia?s leading providers of telecommunication services with presence in all the 22 licensed jurisdictions (also known as telecom circles) in India, Srilanka, and Bangladesh. The company served an aggregate of 121,852,576 customers as of December 31, 2009, in India; of whom 118,864,031 subscribe to GSM mobile services and 2,988,545 use telemedia services either for voice and/or broadband access delivered through DSL.
Bharti Airtel is the largest wireless service provider in the country, based on the number of customers as of December 31, 2009. It offers an integrated suite of telecom solutions to enterprise customers, in addition to providing long distance connectivity both nationally and internationally. It also offers DTH and IPTV Services. ?The past year was, without doubt, transformational in many respects. Our focus on spreading the benefits of telecommunications in rural India has yielded particularly gratifying results? said Sunil Bharti Mittal, chairman and managing director, Bharti Airtel.
All these services are rendered under a unified brand ?Airtel?. The company also deploys, owns and manages passive infrastructure pertaining to telecom operations under its subsidiary Bharti Infratel Ltd. Bharti Infratel owns 42% of Indus Towers Ltd. Bharti Infratel and Indus Towers are the two top providers of passive infrastructure services in India. For the nine month ended December 31, 2009 the company?s total revenues stood at Rs 29,559 crore with a net income of Rs 7,048 crore and and Ebitda margin at 41.3%.
Though the most profitable telecom company in the country, of late its rate of growth has slowed down due to the ongoing tariff wars in the country leading to rates as low as half a rupee.
The company has already crossed the 100-million subscriber mark, which makes it the third largest single country mobile services operator and sixth largest in-country integrated telecom operator in the world.
The company is currently engaged in negotiations for taking over the African operations of Kuwaiti telecom group, Zain Telecom. Should the acquisition materialize Bharti combined revenue base would grow to around $12 billion with over 165 million subscribers and operations across 20 countries.
Mittal says, ?As a first step towards pursuing our international aspirations, we commenced operations in Sri Lanka. The runaway success of the launch has justified our conviction that the Airtel business model can be effectively and profitably replicated in other countries. We are determined to pursue our international strategy going forward.?
The company is divided into various business divisions. Some of the key are:
Mobile Services: Bharti Airtel has a customer market share of 22.7% of India?s wireless market, as on December 31, 2009. Its wireless network is present in 5,078 census towns and 433,851non-census towns and villages in India, thus covering approximately 83.6% of the country?s population. Airtel Sri Lanka is amongst the fastest growing launches in the world with a base of over 1 million customers within six months of launch.
Telemedia Services: The strategy of Bharti Airtel?s Telemedia business is to focus on cities with high revenue potential. Currently, the company offers services in 95 cities across India. Product offerings in this segment include installation of fixed-line telephones providing local, national and international long distance voice connectivity and broadband Internet access through DSL.
Enterprise Services: Airtel is India?s leading provider of communications services to large Enterprise and Carrier customers. It offers long distance wholesale voice and data services to over 400 carrier customers, as well as to the Mobility and Telemedia business units of Airtel.