Even as the country’s mobile subscriber base crossed the 200 million mark, Bharti Airtel, India’s largest telecom operator, was achieving new milestones of its own. End-September 2007, Bharti Airtel became the first Indian company to reach the 50 million subscriber mark, becoming the fastest company in the world to do so and the tenth largest wireless operator globally.
Although the 50 million figure includes mobile as well as broadband and telephone customers, it is the mobile user base at 48 million that clearly accounts for the bulk of the connections. While it took Bharti nearly 10 years to cross the 25 million mark, it added the next 25 million customers in just 14 months. This is amongst the fastest rates of customer additions achieved by any telecom company in the world.
With the next level of growth expected to come in from the rural areas, Bharti Airtel is targeting its next 50 million users from this segment, and has formulated ambitious expansion plans for rural India. It intends to make considerable investments in network expansion to establish a strong presence in all census towns as well as in over 500,000 villages by 2010, thus covering 95 per cent of the country’s population.
Meanwhile, stealing a march over other operators like BSNL, Bharti Airtel is set to become the first Indian telecom operator to launch mobile money transfer services in India. Earlier this year, the company joined hands with the State Bank of India, creating an innovative publicprivate partnership to launch a pilot programme for this service.
The mobile money transfer service will be particularly useful, given the fact that India is the biggest recipient of overseas remittances in the world at $25 billion, which, according to Unstrung, an international publication accounts for around 10 per cent of the world remittance market. With this market growing at 20 per cent a year in India, the service will enable Indians abroad to easily and securely send remittances to their dependants, many of whom do not even have bank accounts. This service will be of great value to the rural population as individuals will gain access to the benefits of a full range of financial services regardless of socio-economic status and geographical location. Moreover, the lower transaction costs and ease of use of these services, coupled with the fact that India has more than 200 million mobile subscribers, will transform the telecom landscape of the country.
Bharti Airtel and IBM are working together to create the Mobile Wallet which will turn the mobile phone into a credit card and provide other services, including a navigator device for locationbased facilities such as accessing maps, information and directions.
As Bharti Airtel continues to maintain its momentum in all spheres of the wireless domain, it is evident that the company’s strong focus on rural expansion will grow its subscriber base further. Its falling average revenue per user will also be shored up by the strengthening of its value-added services portfolio.
