ABOUT Bharti Airtel

ABOUT Bharti Airtel

Type	Public company
Traded as	BSE: 532454 NSE: BHARTIARTL BSE SENSEX Constituent
Industry	Telecommunications
Founded	7 July 1995
Founder(s)	Sunil Bharti Mittal
Headquarters	New Delhi, India
Area served	South Asia, Africa and the Channel Islands
Key people	Sunil Bharti Mittal (Chairman) and (MD)
Products	Fixedline Telephony Mobile Telephony Broadband Internet Digital Television IT services
Revenue	59,601 crore (US$11.89 billion) (2011)[1]
Profit	6,046 crore (US$1.21 billion) (2011)[1]
Total assets	100,785 crore (US$20.11 billion) (2011)[1]
Employees	20,675 (Decemeber 2011)[1]
Parent	Bharti Enterprises (63.45%) SingTel (32.15%) Vodafone (4.4%)
Subsidiaries	Airtel Africa Airtel Digital TV Airtel Sri Lanka Airtel Bangla
Website	www.airtel.com

Bharti Airtel Limited (NSE: BHARTIARTL, BSE: 532454), commonly known as Airtel, is an Indian telecommunications company that operates in 20 countries across South Asia, Africa and the Channel Islands. It operates a GSM network in all countries, providing 2G or 3G services depending upon the country of operation.^[2] Airtel is the 3rd largest telecom operator in the world with over 243.336 million customers across 20 countries as of March 2012.^[3] It is the largest cellular service provider in India, with over 178.78 million subscribers at the end of February 2012.^[4] Airtel is the third largest in-country mobile operator by subscriber base, behind China Mobile and China Unicom.

Airtel is the largest provider of mobile telephony and second largest provider of fixed telephony in India, and is also a provider of broadband and subscription television services. It offers its telecom services under the Airtel brand and is headed by Sunil Bharti Mittal. Bharti Airtel is the first Indian telecom service provider to achieve Cisco Gold Certification. It also acts as a carrier for national and international long distance communication services. The company has a submarine cable landing station at Chennai, which connects the submarine cable connecting Chennai and Singapore.

It is known for being the first mobile phone company in the world to outsource all of its business operations except marketing, sales and finance. Its network (base stations, microwave links, etc.) are maintained by Ericsson, Nokia Siemens Network and Huawei,business support is provided by IBM, and transmission towers are maintained by another company (Bharti Infratel Ltd. in India).^]Ericsson agreed for the first time to be paid by the minute for installation and maintenance of their equipment rather than being paid up front, which allowed Airtel to provide low call rates of Rs. 1/minute (US$0.02/minute).^[8] During the last financial year [2009–10], Bharti has negotiated for its strategic partner Alcatel-Lucent to manage the network infrastructure for the Telemedia Business.

GAURAV KUMAR

PGDM 2^ND

PGDM/11/14