AIRTEL ALL SET TO SCALE 100 MILLION MARK

Airtel is set to become the first Indian operator with 100 million subscribers nationwide, in all probability within a few weeks at the end of March, Bharti Airtel’s overall subscriber base was 96.6 million after including the subscribers added in April, its total subscriber base is expected to hit 99 million Airtel added 32.5 million subscribers in 2008-09 with an average of 2.7 million subscribers per month.

Airtel added a record 8.37 million new subscribers in January-March quarter, according to a statement issued by company. These numbers suggest that Airtel’s mobile subscriber base alone is already to 97 million (93.92 million of its 96.6 million subscribers in March were mobile subscribers).

Somewhere in the middle of May its overall subscriber base is likely to cross 100 million and by May-end early June its mobile subscriber base is expected to cross the 100 million mark.

Airtel’s CEO & Jt MD Manoj Kohli admitted that the 100-million subscriber mark would be breached atleast by early June. This means that nearly one of every 13 Indians will be using an Airtel subscription by that time.

This will also improve Airtel’s global ranking others ahead of Bharti Airtel include China Mobile, Vodafone (UK), Telefonica (Spain), Telenor (Scandinavia), China Unicom, T Mobile (Germany) and Orange (France). Yet, unlike Bharti whose 100-million subscriber base has come from a single country India most of its rivals in the top ten have consolidated figures across many countries. Where single country subscriber numbers are concerned, Bharti will rank in the top five with every possibility of becoming the second or third largest in the world by 2012 after China Mobile/China Unicom.

By comparison, the world’s largest mobile company, state-owned China Mobile already serves close to 480 million subscribers, 80 million more than India’s total mobile population.