Bharti Airtel Rural Strategy
CLUE Case Study
Bharti Airtel Rural Strategy
Connected Life Experiences on the Move
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
COMPANY PROFILE Bharti Airtel Limited is one of Asia’s leading integrated telecom services providers with operations in 19 countries across Asia and Africa. The company is structured into four strategic business units: mobile, telemedia, enterprise, and digital TV. The mobile business offers services in India, Sri Lanka, and Bangladesh. COMPANY HISTORY Bharti Airtel was established as Bharti TeleVentures Limited in 1985. This telecommunication company is a joint stock holding enterprise headquartered in New Delhi. Bharti Airtel, commonly called “Airtel,” is among largest mobile service operators with a subscriber base of nearly 75 million.
Challenge/Opportunity
Bharti Airtel was faced with the challenge of profitably serving the rural areas of India. It is an extremely daunting task due to a variety of factors: rural users’ low incomes, a widely dispersed population, and a less than ideal public infrastructure (i.e., roads, electricity, etc.). Specifically, Bharti Airtel had to address the following conditions:
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The incomes of Indian rural residents are significantly lower than urban residents. The average revenue per user (ARPU) for rural residents was typically less than US$2 per month.
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Besides deploying a scalable network, Bharti Airtel also needed to establish a cost-effective marketing, sales, and distribution channel to provide service promotion and customer support.
Counter to these challenges were the significant opportunity that the Indian rural market represented and Bharti Airtel’s unique ability to address it.
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The future growth of the Indian mobile market is expected to be driven by rural customers, which account for about 70 percent of the country’s total population (1.1 billion people) with a teledensity of only 18.5 percent as of September 2009. Indian urban mobile penetration is already over 100 percent.
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Bharti Airtel Rural Strategy
Connected Life Experiences on the Move
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
COMPANY PROFILE Bharti Airtel Limited is one of Asia’s leading integrated telecom services providers with operations in 19 countries across Asia and Africa. The company is structured into four strategic business units: mobile, telemedia, enterprise, and digital TV. The mobile business offers services in India, Sri Lanka, and Bangladesh. COMPANY HISTORY Bharti Airtel was established as Bharti TeleVentures Limited in 1985. This telecommunication company is a joint stock holding enterprise headquartered in New Delhi. Bharti Airtel, commonly called “Airtel,” is among largest mobile service operators with a subscriber base of nearly 75 million.
Challenge/Opportunity
Bharti Airtel was faced with the challenge of profitably serving the rural areas of India. It is an extremely daunting task due to a variety of factors: rural users’ low incomes, a widely dispersed population, and a less than ideal public infrastructure (i.e., roads, electricity, etc.). Specifically, Bharti Airtel had to address the following conditions:
●
The incomes of Indian rural residents are significantly lower than urban residents. The average revenue per user (ARPU) for rural residents was typically less than US$2 per month.
●
Besides deploying a scalable network, Bharti Airtel also needed to establish a cost-effective marketing, sales, and distribution channel to provide service promotion and customer support.
Counter to these challenges were the significant opportunity that the Indian rural market represented and Bharti Airtel’s unique ability to address it.
●
The future growth of the Indian mobile market is expected to be driven by rural customers, which account for about 70 percent of the country’s total population (1.1 billion people) with a teledensity of only 18.5 percent as of September 2009. Indian urban mobile penetration is already over 100 percent.
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