As per the latest published global rankings released by World Cellular Information Service (WCIS), Bharti Airtel is now the third largest mobile operator in the world. Statistics show that with a subscriber base of 303 million subscribers across 20 countries, it ranks third behind Vodafone Group (403.08 million) and China Mobile (626.27 million).
Airtel began operations in November 1995 in New Delhi (India).
Commenting on this achievement Sunil Bharti Mittal, Chairman, Bharti Airtel 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 customers, 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 offering 2G, 3G services and Airtel Money across all 17 countries in Africa.
