Airtel's next 50 million
Manoj Kohli is pretty sure which road he needs to walk down to get his company Bharti Airtel’s next 50 million cellular phone customers. “The road to the next 50 million customers would largely be through the villages of India,” he says. It will be a long and expensive trek to the heart of India. And Airtel knows that.
It has lined up $2.45 billion (or Rs 9,555 crore) in investment to wire up villages. The plan, says Kohli, is to reach out to 5,200 towns and more than five lakh villages, “where nothing but the Airtel sign would be visible”.
Not surprisingly, Airtel has its own bottom of the pyramid strategy to pry open rural markets. A part of that strategy are recharge cards of Rs 10 packaged like just any other FMCG product; in this case, more like a sachet of gutkha.
Kohli says that Airtel is training 7 lakh retailers across rural India in customer care and even instant trouble shooting for charge cardrelated queries. These retailers will range from panwallahs to moffusil bus stops to a kiosk selling grocery near village chaupal.
They will display the Airtel charge cards just as they hang strips of gutkha sachets. Such aggressive selling, Kohli reckons, will help Airtel touch 125 million in subscriber base by the end of 2010.
Airtel’s larger ambition, however, is to become a global onestop shop for all communication requirements. Therefore, “unmatched” broadband (8 Mbps speed) in 100 cities will be a key part of its future initiatives. On that will ride its IPTV plans, which should see the service getting launched in the National Capital Region (NCR) in November this year.
Besides, it is expanding itself as a long-distance carrier by expanding its 50,000 km backbone by another 40 per cent. Also, in the next two years, Airtel will be laying three more submarine cables for international access, launching mobile TV and even DTH.
