Airtel breaks into world's Top 10 with 50 million users

Bharti Airtel on Monday announced that its customer base, including landline and broadband services, had crossed 50 million from 25 million in July last year.

With this, Bharti has become the first Indian telecom company to break into the global top 10 operators who have over 50 million subscribers in a single country. Bharti executives also said that it crossing the 50-million mark in a period of just 12 years marks the shortest time recorded by any operator in the world to touch this figure.

â??Our next target is to reach 100-million mark well before by 2010. Currently, we are adding over two million subscriber per month and we therefore hope to get to 100 million fast,â? Bharti Airtel's joint managing director Akhil Gupta told reporters on Monday. Mr Gupta also added that a significant majority of the next 50 million subscribers would come from rural India. â??While we increase our focus on rural India, the Average Revenues Per User (ARPU) is likely to fall from about Rs 390 at present, but this will not be a cause of concern,â? Mr Gupta added

Explaining Bharti's growth over the last several years, president and CEO Manoj Kohli said: â??Bharti Airtel crossed the 10-million customer mark in November 2004. In July last year, it crossed the 25-million customer mark. The company added the next 25 million customers in just 14 months. This is amongst the fastest rate of customer additions by any telecom company in the world.â?

Of Bharti's 50 million subscribers, about 96% is accounted for by the wireless users â?? put simply, 47.99 million of its total subscriber base consists of mobile users. As of September end, the companies that had more subscribers than Bharti in a single country are China mobile (350.7 million), China Unicom (158.1 million), AT&T (65.1 million), Verizon (64.5 million) Sprint (55.6 million), NTT DoCoMo (53.2 million) Vimpelcom (50.1 million) while America Movil (48.2 million) was just behind. Industry analysts are confident that that Bharti will move to the third spot after China Mobile and China Unicom within the next 12 months.

Mr Kohli also added that the going forward, Bharti would make considerable investments to ensure that it covered all the 5,200 census towns completely, its services be available in over five lakh villages and also reach 95% of India's population. He also said that Bharti would launch its direct-to-home television service by the end of the fiscal year, while adding that it would also launch IPTV services by the calendar year end.