iWorld
Airtel crosses 650 million customers to cement its place as world’s second largest telco
The Indian telecoms giant, now spanning 15 countries, is chasing the top spot with satellites, smartphones and mobile money
NEW DELHI: Numbers like these do not come around often. Bharti Airtel has crossed 650 million customers, making it the world’s second largest telecom operator by mobile customer base, according to GSMA Intelligence. Only one rival sits ahead of it. The gap, Airtel intends to close.
Gopal Vittal, executive vice chairman of Bharti Airtel, was characteristically measured. “Achieving the milestone of 650 million customers to be the second largest operator globally is a great responsibility for us to serve our customers better every day,” he said. “Every customer interaction is an opportunity to earn trust and deliver value.”
The scale of the operation is striking. In India, Airtel serves over 368 million mobile customers and was the first operator to launch 5G Plus services. It now reaches over 13 million homes with high-speed internet and a further 15 million households through its Digital TV offering. Its enterprise arm, Airtel Business, runs mission-critical infrastructure across cybersecurity, cloud, IoT and SD-WAN, underpinned by over 400,000 route kilometres of subsea fibre and a string of green data centres. The company has also announced a push into non-banking financial services, using its data insights to offer personalised credit products through the Airtel app.
Africa tells an equally ambitious story. Airtel Africa serves over 179 million customers across 14 countries, with Airtel Money, its mobile financial platform, counting over 52 million users. In a continent where traditional banking remains out of reach for millions, Airtel Money is not a product. It is infrastructure.
Beyond terrestrial networks, Airtel is reaching upward. Partnerships with Eutelsat OneWeb and SpaceX give it access to a constellation of low earth orbit satellites, pushing high-speed, low-latency broadband to remote maritime, aviation and rural areas that cables will never reach.
Airtel’s networks now cover over two billion people across 15 countries. The company that began as an Indian mobile operator has become something rather larger. At 650 million customers and climbing, it is not finished yet.
iWorld
Prashant Iyer joins Sony LIV as head of marketing
The former Netflix India director grew the streamer’s social following from half a million to 55m
MUMBAI: Sony LIV has poached one of India’s most battle-hardened streaming marketers. Prashant Iyer, who spent nearly eight years at Netflix building its India operation into a social-media juggernaut, has joined the platform as head of marketing.
Iyer leaves Netflix having done rather a lot. He grew the streamer’s India social community from roughly 500,000 followers to over 55m, delivered engagement and organic impressions double those of rivals, and ran more than 250 campaigns across titles, brand and partnerships. In his final role as director, marketing, he sat on the core leadership team credited with driving 15-times revenue and subscription growth over eight years. He also served as the only director-level social leader across Asia-Pacific, a regional mandate that stretched across a 200m-plus follower community.
Before Netflix came Nike, where Iyer spent three and a half years straddling digital brand commerce and key account management, including ownership of Myntra, the brand’s largest digital account in India. Earlier still, Titan Company gave him his first crack at brand and digital marketing.
Sony LIV, which has been muscling for position in an increasingly crowded streaming market, has landed a marketer who knows precisely how to build an audience from scratch and, just as importantly, how to keep it. For a platform still chasing the kind of cultural cachet Netflix India took years to earn, that is not a bad place to start.
