Saturday, November 20, 2010

Adding 1 m subscribers every month in Africa: Bharti Airtel

Bhart Airtel is betting big on Africa. The company has started to restructure its Africa network, has now set an ambitious target of a 100 million subscribers by 2012.



Siddharth Zarabi caught up with Manoj Kohli the joint MD and CEO of Bharti's international operations and asked him about Bharti's strategy to turnaround Zain.







Excerpts from India Business Hour on CNBC-TV18 Watch the full show »











Kohli said the operations of Zain actually declining for last 18months or so. "Revenues, profit, EBITDA, market share was declining and my first job there, was to get the decline to be over so that we can revive it and start a growth trend and that I think we have done within the first three months." Since the last month, he said here has been very good growth. "Minutes are growing, MoU (Minutes of Usage) per customer are growing, revenues are growing and I feel customer satisfaction is growing and today is the brand launch in Africa. You will see a very remarkable change in this market."



Below is a verbatim transcript of the interview. Also watch the accompanying video.



Q: You recently cut tariffs in Kenya and I would imagine that, that has been one part of the turnaround and uptick that you have just described. Perhaps you have also done something similar in other markets, tell us what is the strategy going forward and what will happen in the remaining 13 countries under your purview?



A: Our strategy of course is taking our network deep into the market, into small town, into rural areas, also offer affordable services. Now strategy is affordability and not have price wars etc. which some people are portraying it as.



Q: Sometime back we had heard from the company that they expected the operations to turnaround after a couple of quarters, are we on track for that and what are the levers that you are really betting on for that kind of turnaround?



A: We are going through a restructure period which can take a couple of quarters. There a around 6 – 7 big restructurings that we are doing in Africa. Our network is being fully restructured.



Q: What is the current status of subscribers? Can you share with us the latest subscriber numbers?



A: We have more than 40 million active customers. We are adding more than a million active customers a month.



Q: So when you say active subscribers are you also hinting at the fact that you probably shed some subscribers across the geographies that you are operating in?



A: When we took over we had shed about 6 million from 42 million to 36 million.


News From: http://www.7StarNews.com

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