The Hindu Business Line : Bharti Airtel crosses 40-m subscriber mark

New Delhi May 23 India's largest mobile operator Bharti Airtel has become the tenth cellular operator in the world to join an exclusive list of global telecom operators with more than 40 million customers from a single country.

The company on Wednesday announced that it has crossed the 40 million-mobile customer milestone. Operators like Vodafone and SingTel, which have subscribers in multiple countries, have not been taken into the reckoning for deciding the rankings.

"This landmark customer base was achieved in just 12 years, making Bharti Airtel one of the fastest companies to make it to this exclusive list.

The last 12 months have witnessed Bharti Airtel dominating the Indian telecom space and recording spectacular growth, both in terms of customers and revenues. This remarkable achievement is highlighted by the fact that it took Airtel 11 years to reach the 20-million customer landmark, and just another 13 months to add the next 20 million customers," said a press release.

Going by the current growth rate, Bharti is expected to add another 20 million subscribers over the next year, which will probably make it among the top 5 global mobile operators.

Market share

The company's overall wireless market share increased to over 23.2 per cent as on April 2007, from 20.4 per cent in FY06. In fact, Bharti Airtel has increased its lead over all other operators in the marketplace.

For instance, Airtel's lead over Hutch has widened from 2 million in March 2006 to over 11 million in April 2007. Similarly, Airtel's lead over Idea and BSNL has increased from 11 million to 24 million and from 0.5 million to 8 million, respectively. Airtel's swing over the number two operator in the country — Reliance Communications — has increased to a lead of 9 million.

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