 "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.”
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%.
Born with the sole aim of correcting people, Sharon took to copy-editing at an early age. In the olden days her methods of correction were rather unorthodox. Don't believe us? Ask the intern who lost two of his er.... Oh ok, I guess we don't talk about that. Now after she got a kid, things have relatively mellowed down. Besides handling the plethora of content that comes out of Tech2, Sharon also handles our sister site, CompareIndia where you can well compare prices of pretty much every electronic item under the sun and CHIP magazine as well, if things weren't heavy enough. She handles a team, all of who seem real happy as long as they're not chained to their desks.