Airtel

About the Company

Bharti Airtel Limited, commonly known as Airtel, is an Indian multinational telecommunications services company based in New Delhi. It operates in 18 countries across South Asia and Africa, as well as the Channel Islands. Currently, Airtel provides 5G, 4G and LTE Advanced services throughout India. Currently offered services include fixed-line broadband, and voice services depending upon the country of operation. Airtel had also rolled out its Voice over LTE (VoLTE) technology across all Indian telecom circles.[6] It is the second largest mobile network operator in India and the second largest mobile network operator in the world.[4] Airtel was named India’s 2nd most valuable brand in the first ever Brandz ranking by Millward Brown and WPP plc.[7]

Airtel is credited with pioneering the strategic management of outsourcing all of its business operations except marketing, sales and finance and building the ‘minutes factory’ model of low cost and high volumes. The strategy has since been adopted by several operators.[8] Airtel’s equipment is provided and maintained by Ericsson, Huawei, and Nokia Networks[9] whereas IT support is provided by Amdocs. The transmission towers are maintained by subsidiaries and joint venture companies of Bharti including Bharti Infratel (merged with Indus Towers) and Indus Towers in India.[10] Ericsson agreed for the first time to be paid by the minute for installation and maintenance of their equipment rather than being paid upfront, which allowed Airtel to provide low call rates of ₹1 (1.2¢ US)/minute.

Telecom Seychelles
On 11 August 2010, Bharti Airtel announced that it would acquire a 100% stake in Telecom Seychelles for US$62 million taking its global presence to 19 countries. Telecom Seychelles began operations in 1998 and operates 3G, fixed-line, ship to shore services, satellite telephony, among value added services like VSAT and Gateways for International Traffic across Seychelles under the Airtel brand. The company has over 57% share of the mobile market of Seychelles.[40] Airtel announced plans to invest US$10 million in its fixed and mobile telecoms network in Seychelles over three years, whilst also participating in the Seychelles East Africa submarine cable (SEAS) project. The US$34 million SEAS project is aimed at improving Seychelles’ global connectivity by building a 2,000 km undersea high-speed link to Dar es Salaam in Tanzania