Together good things happen - Airtel

CEO (India & South Asia)’s
Airtel Way
The Winds of change set in by the middle of first quarter. Seeing
the success of your Company in the past leading the growth
story of “India Telecom”, many Indian and International players
launched wireless services in many circles. Irrational pricing and
short term focus were the main planks of their strategy. We were
patient and retaliated on the superiority of our network and
the ability to effectively serve a large base of customers.
Exiting the year, our “minute factory” was producing nearly
2 bn minutes a day, and our revenue market share stood tall at
32%, more than ever before. We have conclusively left our
competition far behind and have won this round of
hyper-competition. It was indeed a humbling experience to be
the first to cross the magical 100 mn customer milestone and
ending the year with over 137 mn customers, a growth of
over 41% over last year.
In our endeavor to continuously redefine and deliver the
benchmarks of customer experience, we further extended our
well established outsourcing model, by forming a joint venture
with Alcatel Lucent - to manage our pan-India broadband and
telephone services network. This partnership will helped us leverage
Alcatel-Lucent’s global expertise in IP transformation and network
management while allowing us to focus on customer delivery
and market growth. It also helped us to accelerate our performance,
as we migrate to next generation networks for our broadband
and telephone customers, hence opening the doors to
advanced services and applications.
Last year saw the Digital TV industry expand by 9 mn
customers, almost equal to the numbers it grew by in the
preceding five years. Leading this digitisation wave was our
Airtel Digital TV business unit. Riding on the synergies of
message
Bharti Airtel Annual Report 2009-10
Airtel's extensive wireless distribution network, Airtel Digital
TV today caters to customers in over 5,000 towns and
thousands of villages. We command a customer share of over
25% amongst new customers added, in a highly competitive
market with as many as six paid DTH players. In a short span of
20 months of operations, we have gained market leadership in
acquiring new customers in eleven out of nineteen state
clusters, even when we had to establish our foothold against
players who have completed more than five years of
operations. This has resulted in a continuous and a steady growth
in our cumulative market share within this space.
In this year of significantly enhanced competition, we were
able to return a 12% increase in gross revenue and
maintained an EBIDTA levels over 40%, proving that it’s the
Airtel Way to hold a promise, even when the going is tough!
Airtel New
Riding high on the confidence of our proven business model and
execution capabilities, we explored new geographies with
both wireless and wireline business units. We entered the new
territory of Bangladesh by acquiring 70% stake in Warid Telecom.
Bangladesh, with a population of over 160 mn and tele-density
of only 32%, is a very promising market for telecom services.
Bharti Airtel is committed to make fresh investments in
expanding network, thereby giving the people of Bangladesh
the same customer experience that we are renowned for! You
may recall that it is also the largest investment in Bangladesh,
by an Indian company.
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