Airtel Crosses 40 mln Customer Milestone

Bharti Airtel has crossed the 40 million-mobile customer milestone becoming the first Indian mobile services provider and the 10th in the world to join an exclusive list of global telecom operators with more than 40 million mobile customers from a single country.

It took Airtel 11 years to reach the 20 million customer landmark and another 13 months to add the next 20 million customers. Airtel’s lead over Hutch widened from 2 million in March 2006 to over 11 million in April 2007. Similarly, its lead over Idea and BSNL increased from 11 million to 24 million and from 0.5 million to 8 million, respectively.

Sanjay Kapoor, president, Mobile Services, Bharti Airtel said, “Last year we created history by significantly increasing our market share and distancing ourselves from our competitors. The 40 million customer milestone is indeed a remarkable achievement not only for us at Airtel, but also for the country as it clearly underscores the coming of age of Indian companies in the international telecom arena.”

More from News & Analysis

What is the US HIRE Bill and why is India’s $250-billion IT sector worried? Is the internet dead? What's this theory that OpenAI's Sam Altman says might be true?

Currently, Airtel is present in nearly 4,700 census towns and over 200,000 non-census towns and villages covering 59% of the country’s population. The company plans to roll out more than 30,000 cell sites in FY08 to increase its population coverage to 70%.