Comments on: India's Bharti Airtel to Enter Telecom's Top Five

By: Nikhil

Nikhil — Sun, 23 May 2010 18:44:51 +0000

Why Singtel (273m subs) is not on your list of top 8 ?

By: V.RAVICHANDER

V.RAVICHANDER — Sun, 09 May 2010 11:54:54 +0000

Airtel has lost its trust in India, hence hey are expanding. The 'Phony marketing' techniques backed up cockroach approach to customer service, with Airtel having outsourced everything but to their waist strategy may not work in Africa!

In India, their fate would be known July 1,2010 after Mobile Number Portability(MNP) will be in operation.

By: Nikhlesh

Nikhlesh — Fri, 16 Apr 2010 16:23:55 +0000

That makes perfect sense, Thank you very much Will !!

By: gbp

gbp — Fri, 16 Apr 2010 14:17:44 +0000

Indian telecom sector needs another consolidation. The first consolidation between 1996-99 wasn't good enough. Half of the existing can be merged resulting in 4 - 6 major players.

By: Will Croft

Will Croft — Fri, 16 Apr 2010 13:00:31 +0000

Ah, WordPress seems to have stripped some characters from that last link - you'll need to add square brackets around tt_news and backPid for it to work, like so:

151.html?&tx_ttnews[tt_news]=339&tx_ttnews[backPid]=116

By: Will Croft

Will Croft — Fri, 16 Apr 2010 12:53:40 +0000

Nikhlesh & Chetan: the data is correct because we are looking at majority-owned markets here. There is a difference between Airtel Group and Bharti Group in that Bharti only owns about a third of Airtel itself (28.92% as of Q4).

If we were to take the parent, Bharti, as a group in this ranking, then they would appear far lower than Airtel on its own because none of India, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh nor a potential Zain acquisition would register as a majority-owned subsidiary.

This is why we show Airtel as a group as they hold the direct ownership of the subsidiaries above.

The difference with the remaining markets – Seychelles, Jersey and Guernsey is that these are held directly by Bharti and not through Airtel and so aren’t included in Airtel Group.

Bharti itself then actually appears 369th with the majority (and full) ownership of just these three markets.

So, a technicality, but a necessary one in this kind of analysis as you run the risk of double-counting a great many operators’ connections if you don’t enforce a majority-ownership rule on a non-proportionate basis.

This is all explained in the footnotes to the table in our PDF.

Bharti themselves also concur on the 18 Airtel markets in their recent press release: http://www.bharti.com/151.html?&tx_ttnews%5Btt_news%5D=339&tx_ttnews%5BbackPid%5D=116&cHash=82e3712758

By: Katie

Katie — Fri, 16 Apr 2010 11:15:30 +0000

In the largest ever telecom takeover by an Indian firm, Bharti Airtel on Tuesday signed a deal with Kuwait-based Zain Telecom to buy its African business for $10.7 billion. No wonder they are in top 10.

By: Hardik Vania

Hardik Vania — Fri, 16 Apr 2010 10:22:47 +0000

Chetan, Though numbers of subscriber numbers might not get converted in big revenue numbers(ARPU) in emerging markets currently, However it opens up big opportunities to grow revenues in future. I think that's why - Vodafone brough Hutch's india business and if i am not incorrect - It contributes significantly to Vodafone's Profits.

And it's worth noticing here - Even with 1 cent/min. call rate - Most of the telcos in india are making decent profit. So they can export this business model to conquer other markets too.

My 2 cents.

Hardik

By: iamanshul

iamanshul — Fri, 16 Apr 2010 08:14:20 +0000

If only we could show ARPU on the list. It would be a more complete view.

By: J

Fri, 16 Apr 2010 07:00:34 +0000

The number of Bharti Airtel markets post Zain purchase will be 18 as Jersey, Guernsey and Seychelles are held by Bharti Group outside of Bharti Airtel.