Airtel Becomes World’s Third Largest Mobile Operator

A NEW report has placed China Mobile as operator with largest wireless mobile connections in the world followed by Vodafone Group and Bharti Airtel.

Quoting latest data published by World Cellular Information Service (WCIS), it said China Mobile is the top mobile operator in the world with 626.27 million subscribers. According to WCIS, Vodafone Group of UK ranks second with 403.08 million subscribers; Airtel has over 303 million mobile subscribers across its operations while China Unicom 299.09 million and America Movil 274.14 million.

With the report, Airtel moved up one position in the global rankings. Airtel began operations in November 1995 in New Delhi (India) and in less than two decades it has emerged as one of the top brands in the emerging markets with an unmatched scale and diversity of operations.

The Company pioneered the low-cost business model based on outsourcing that has allowed it to expand its services rapidly and give customers affordable access to mobile telephony.

Chairman, Bharti Airtel, Sunil Bharti Mittal, said: “This is a major landmark in the journey of Airtel and underlines the strength of our business model and our brand that is loved by customers across 20 countries. Today, we seamlessly manage global scale operations in diverse geographies and deliver the same world-class services to each customer; this perhaps is one of our biggest achievements.

“I want to thank our employees and our business partners for supporting us through this exciting journey and with the mobile internet play about to happen in the developing world, things will only get brighter from here on.”

Airtel’s mobile networks cover over 1.85 billion people across its operations in 20 countries and carried over 1.23 trillion minutes of calls and over 333 petabytes of data in FY 2014-15.

In Africa, Bharti Airtel is the largest mobile operator in the continent in terms of geographical footprint. It offers 2G, 3G services and Airtel Money across 17 countries in Africa. Airtel Money is one of the largest and fastest growing m-commerce services on the continent and with data adoption leading the growth on the continent, Airtel is well positioned to leverage the opportunities.