Bharti Airtel Takes Over China Unicom as 3rd Largest Mobile Operator with 303 million Subscribers

The largest Mobile Operator in India and a leading group operator with operations in 20 countries across Asia and Africa, Bharti Airtel, last week announced that it has become the third largest mobile operator in the world, moving up one position in global rankings with over 303 million customers across 20 countries based on data published by the World Cellular Information Service (WCIS). Airtel said that its 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 the financial year 2014-2015. Bharti Airtel boasts a large distribution channel that is spread across 1.5 Mn outlets, with network presence in 5,121 census and 464,045 non-census towns and villages in India, covering approximately 86.8% of the country’s population.

Besides its wide range of mobile services offerings in India, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka, the Operator offers 2G, 3G services and Airtel Money services across all 17 countries in Africa. The Airtel Money service is one of the largest and fastest growing m-commerce services on the continent and with data adoption leading the growth in the region, Airtel is well positioned to leverage the opportunities, said Airtel.

Sunil Bharti Mittal, Chairman, Bharti Airtel
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.

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