Bharti Airtel’s Sunil Mittal has revealed his long-term “dream” of emerging market telecom players making acquisitions in developed markets.
Speaking at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, the chairman of India’s largest mobile…
Bharti Airtel’s Sunil Mittal has revealed his long-term “dream” of emerging market telecom players making acquisitions in developed markets.
Speaking at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, the chairman of India’s largest mobile operator said that emerging players could bring new ideas, worked out in developing markets, to the industry as a whole.
“I have a dream that we, from the emerging markets, will strengthen ourselves…and acquire [in] some of the developed markets,” Mittal said during a panel debate on strategies for developing markets.
Bharti Airtel already has 250 million customers, with around 80% of them living in India.
Mittal also admitted problems with the company’s expansion in Africa, saying that the cost of operations was higher there than in the Indian market.
He highlighted that there was a smaller middle class, which meant that many people could not afford services. “We will have to figure out a different model,” he said.
Bharti Airtel made its debut in Africa in 2010 when it bought the African operations of Kuwait-based Zain for US$10.7bn.
Other speakers at the conference echoed the view that innovation is increasingly coming from developing markets.
Cisco CEO John Chambers said that “emerging markets [are] often where the innovation is occurring,” while Alcatel Lucent’s CEO Ben Verwaayen remarked that innovation could happen anywhere in the world. “Talent has no passport,” he said.
