Wednesday, February 25, 2009

airtel

Bharti Airtel, formerly known as Bharti Tele-Ventures Limited (BTVL) is India's largest and world's third largest cellular service provider with more than 82 million subscribers as of December 2008.[1] It also offers fixed line services and broadband services. It offers its TELECOM services under the Airtel brand and is headed by Sunil Mittal. The company also provides telephone services and Internet access over DSL in 14 circles. The company complements its mobile, broadband & telephone services with national and international long distance services. The company also has a submarine cable landing station at Chennai, which connects the submarine cable connecting Chennai and Singapore. The company provides end-to-end data and enterprise services to the corporate customers through its nationwide fiber optic backbone, last mile connectivity in fixed-line and mobile circles, VSATs, ISP and international bandwidth access through the gateways and landing station. SingTel owns over 30% of the Bharti Telecom. Vodafone is also a shareholder of Airtel with 4% of the shares. Thus making it a sister company of the brand.[2]

Brands

Airtel

Bharti Airtel India’s largest integrated and the first private telecom services provider in all the 23 telecom circles. With its world class products and services, Bharti Airtel since its inception, has been at the forefront of technology and has steered the course of the telecom sector in the country. The businesses at Bharti Airtel are structured into three strategic business units (SBU’s) - Mobile Services, Telemedia Services & Enterprise Services. The Mobile business provides mobile & fixed wireless services using GSM technology across 23 telecom circles, Telemedia Services business offers broadband & telephone services in 94 cities. The Enterprise services provide end-to-end telecom solution to corporate customers and additionally provides national & international long distance services to carriers. We have recently forayed into Media Business by launching our DTH Services in October 2008. All these services are rendered under a unified brand “Airtel”.

Bharti Airtel serves over 82mn customers as of October 31, 2008; of whom 80,199,747 subscribe to GSM services and 2,549,043 use Telemedia Services either for voice and/or broadband access delivered through DSL. They are the largest wireless service provider in the country, based on the number of subscribers as of October 31, 2008. Bharti Airtel has a dominant position in the GSM services with a market share of 34.5 % as of September 2008.[3]

The company also deploys, owns and manages passive infrastructure pertaining to telecom operations under its subsidiary Bharti Infratel Limited. Bharti Infratel owns 42% of Indus Towers Limited. This has been incorporated with an objective to provide “Shared Telecom Infrastructure” to telecom operators across the world on a nondiscriminatory basis. It’s commitment towards continuous innovation will enable optimization of future tower rollout and enhance operational efficiencies and result in substantial cost savings for its customers.

The strategy of de-coupling infrastructure and backend processes from the core sales and marketing function was a strategy pioneered by Airtel and then implemented by a number of other companies.

Airtel Sri Lanka

In December 2008, Bharti Airtel rolled out third generation services in Sri Lanka in association with Singtel. This is because Asia's telecommunications major SingTel, is a major player in the 3G space as it has already third generation networks in several markets across Asia. It had been largely criticised in recent times on its inability to start operation even two years after its certification and proposed date of launch. [4]

Airtel's operation in Sri Lanka, known as Airtel Lanka, commenced operations on the 12th of January 2009. Their offer of a free SIM card with ever connection from Jan 12-25 led to long queues outside Airtel’s office at Narahenpita, Colombo. Airtel announced the following tariff features at the launch: Same tariffs for peak and off-peak hours, Unconditional free incoming calls, Uniform call charges to any network and 50% lower charges on roaming in India. [5]

Touchtel

Until September 18, 2004, Bharti provided fixed-line telephony and broadband services under the Touchtel brand. Bharti now provides all telecom services including fixed-line services under a common brand "Airtel"

BlackBerry

On 19 October 2004 Airtel announced the launch of a BlackBerry Wireless Solution in India. The launch is a result of a tie-up between Bharti Tele-Ventures Limited and Research In Motion (RIM)..

Digital TV

Main article: Airtel Digital Tv

On 9 October 2008, Airtel joined the DTH bandwagon in India with Airtel Digital TV, a Direct-to-Home Television service.

iPhone 3G

As of 22 August 2008, the Apple iPhone 3G is available in India on Airtel and Vodafone.

Awards and recognition

Bharti Airtel has received recognition for its innovative practices across the world, some are as follows:

  • 3rd Largest Wireless Operator In The World
  • Largest Private Integrated Telecom Company In India
  • Largest Wireless Operator In India
  • Largest Private Fixed Line Operator In India
  • Largest Telecom Company Listed On Indian Stock Exchanges
  • Sunil Bharti Mittal, - Gsm Association Chairman’s Award 2008
  • Sunil Bharti Mittal, - Chosen For Padma Bhushan Awards In 2007
  • Airtel Was Chosen As The 2nd Most Trusted Service Brand In India In The ‘Most Trusted Brands 2008 Survey’ Conducted By The Economic Times - Brand Equity
  • Awarded With Top Honors At The Gsma Mobile World Congress Conference 2008 In Barcelona For The Category “Best Billing/ Customer Care Solution.”
  • Adjudged As The ‘Best Carrier India‘ At The Telecom Asia Award 2008
  • Gallup Great Workplace Award For 2008
  • Ranked 2nd In The Survey Of India’s Most Respected Companies By Businessworld 2007
  • Adjudged As ‘Company Of The Year’ At The Cnbc India Business Leader Awards 2007
  • Economic Times ‘Company Of The Year 2007’ Award For Corporate Excellence
  • Gallup Great Workplace Award For 2008 -Airtel is one of the only 20 companies worldwide and the only company from India to receive the prestigious award. The other winners include companies like Standard Chartered, Qwest Communications and Campbell Soup Company etc. Airtel is one of the only 20 companies worldwide and the only company from India where Organization engagement score is higher in more than 50% of the population. Tom Rath from Gallup mentions "Studying more than 10 million employees worldwide allowed us to set an extraordinarily high bar for this award. The winners have gone far beyond just offering nice perks and benefits. They have created an environment that truly engages people every day, throughout the organization."

In the news

On February 12, 2007 Vodafone sold its 5.6% stake in AirTel back to AirTel for US $1.6 billion; and purchased a controlling stake in rival Hutchison Essar.

In its monthly press release[citation needed], following statistics have been presented for end of April 2007.

  • Bharti Airtel added the highest ever net addition of 5.3 million customers in a single quarter (Q4-FY0607) and also the highest ever net addition of 18 million total subscribers in 2006-07
  • The company will invest up to $3.5 billion this fiscal (07-08) in network expansion.
  • It has an installed base of 40,000 cellsites and 59% population coverage
  • After the proposed network expansion, an additional 30,000 towers will result in the company achieving 70% population coverage
  • Bharti has over 39 million users as on March 31, 2007
  • It has set a target of 125 million subscribers by 2010
  • Prepaid customers account for 88.5% of Bharti’s total subscriber base, an increase from 82.7% a year ago
  • ARPU has dropped to Rs 406
  • Non-voice revenues, (SMS, voice mail, call management, hello tunes and Airtel Live) constituted 10% of total revenues during Q4, lower than 10.7% in the Q4 of the previous year
  • Blended monthly minutes of usage per customer in Q4 was at 475 minutes
  • Has completed 100% verification of its subscribers and in the process disconnected three lakh (300,000) subscribers
  • Bharti Airtel’s enterprise Services, President - David is busy connecting India to Europe. David announced the building of 15,000 km 3.84 Terrabit OFC sub-marine cable system connecting Europe [London] to India via the Middle East. The project is known as Europe India gateway [EIG] and is expected to cost $700 million, which is to be completed by Q2-2010. Alcatel Lucent and Tyco are the telecom vendors for the project.

Members in the EIG consortium include - AT&T, BT, C&W, Djibouti Telecom, Du, Gibtelecom, IAM, Libyan Telecom, MTN Group Ltd., Omantel, PT Comunicacoes-S.A, Saudi Telecom Company, Telecom Egypt, Telkom SA Ltd, and Verizon Business.

In May 2008, it emerged that Bharti Airtel was exploring the possibility of buying the MTN Group, a South Africa-based telecommunications company with coverage in 21 countries in Africa and the Middle East. The Financial Times reported that Bharti was considering offering US$45 billion for a 100% stake in MTN, which would be the largest overseas acquisition ever by an Indian firm. However, both sides emphasize the tentative nature of the talks, while The Economist magazine noted, "If anything, Bharti would be marrying up," as MTN has more subscribers, higher revenues and broader geographic coverage.[6] However, the talks fell apart as MTN group tried to reverse the negotiations by making Bharti almost a subsidiary of the new company [7]

Subscriber base

The Airtel subscriber base according to COAI - Cellular Operator Association of India as of November 2008[8] was:

The total is 78,908,993 or 31.65% of the total 249,349,436 GSM mobile connections in India till November 2008. In 2009 Airtel is launched in Srilanka also.

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