I must admit, telcommunications has been the revolution in the last 20 years. What with revolutionaries like Mo Ibrahim and Sunil Mittal. But this Bharti Airtel can offer many lessons for Safaricom, Zain, YU.
In 2003, With a 20 percent share, Mittal's firm, Bharti Tele-Ventures, held a slender lead in a crowded field that included rivals backed by deep-pocket Indian conglomerates such as Tata and Reliance.
Mittal recalls: "I was meeting with people from Orange, Vodafone, and T-Mobile; and I saw that these were huge companies, hugely resourced. And it began to dawn on me: I have to be like them. But could I afford to be like them? We'd need to hire 10,000 people, maybe 20,000, within two years. Did we have the resources to do that? Were we the best company to attract that kind of talent?
The answer, clearly, was no."
The AnswerHow did Mittal rise to the challenge of managing breakneck growth? By taking a quintessentially Indian solution - outsourcing - and standing it on its head. Egged on by his CFO and a core of in-house technology specialists, Mittal resolved to give away his network.
1. In 2004 he signed contracts to hand over operation of Bharti's entire phone network to Sweden's Ericsson, Germany's Siemens, and Finland's Nokia. The deal means Bharti no longer has to worry about buying and maintaining equipment. Instead it pays the European vendors a fee determined by customer traffic and the quality of service the firms provide.
2. In 2004 Mittal signed a ten-year contract with IBM, farming out the bulk of Bharti's information-technology services, including billing, management of customer accounts and even operation of the Bharti intranet.
The ChallengeSo Kenya landscape is quickly beginning to mirror India, what with Safaricom (Vodafone Essar in India), YU (Essar in India), and now perhaps Zain (Bharti Airtel in India). Have the firms strategically positioned themselves for the next revolution?
Wireless WonderIndia's Sunil Mittal wasn't born to wealth. The graduate of Punjab University founded Bharti at 18. At first he made crankshafts for local bicycle manufacturers. Two successive business breakthroughs went to nothing after shifts in government policy. In 1992, he successfully bid for 1 of the 4 mobile phone network licences auctioned in India.
http://money.cnn.com/mag...01/22/8397979/index.htm