Bharti Airtel Mobile Services Marketing Essay

Bharti Airtel Mobile Services Marketing Essay Airtel is the 3rd largest mobile operator in the world in terms of subscriber base. However, its revenue per subscriber is significantly lower as compared to American and European counterparts. However, Airtel has been facing pressures due to slowing revenue growth and slimming margins. While a lot of the factors are macroeconomic, this paper attempts to do a microeconomic analysis on Airtel and its environment. An Analysis of Bharti Airtel Mobile Services Ltd. Using Microeconomic Tools Bharti Airtel Limited, a part of Bharti Enterprises, is one of the leading providers of telecommunication services with significant presence in India. It has its operations spread over 20 countries across South Asia, Africa and Channel Islands. Profile Bharti Airtel has abou0074 194.183 million subscribers in India and South Asia and 55.855 million GSM Mobile customers in Africa as of the end of June 2012. The Proportionate Revenue of Bharti Airtel as on June 30, 2012 is à ¢Ã¢â‚¬Å¡Ã‚ ¹ 193,501 milli on (Overview). Currently, Airtel is the largest cellular service provider in India in terms of number of subscribers. Bharti Airtel holds the maximum percentage of market share in wireless connections at 20.67%, Vodafone is at 16.96%, Reliance at 14.68%, Idea at 12.88% and BSNL is at 10.81% (News report – Medianama) The businesses at Bharti Airtel have been structured into three individual strategic business units (SBU’s): Mobile services, Telemedia services (ATS) & Enterprise services (Carriers & Services to Corporates) Ownership and Organizational Structure: Bharti Airtel was established on July 7, 1995 as a public listed company headquartered in New Delhi, India. With effect from Jan 13, 2010, a new integrated organizational structure has emerged with an objective to enhance Airtel focus on expanding operations in international markets beyond India and South Asia and further consolidate its leadership position in India. The transformed organizational structure consi sts of two distinct Customer Business Units (CBU) with clear focus on B2C (Business to Customer) and B2B (Business to Business) segments. Bharti Airtel’s B2C business unit comprehensively serves the retail consumers, homes and small offices, by combining business units such as Mobile, Telemedia, Digital TV and other emerging businesses (like M-commerce, M-health, M-advertising etc.). Figure 1: Airtel’s Organization Chart (Overview) The B2C organization encompasses Consumer Business and Market Operations. Bharti Airtel has understood the importance of its partners to remain competitive in a dynamic business environment. As a step in that direction, the Supply Chain (SCM) function has been created with a mandate to develop partner relationships to maximize mutual opportunities for growth and profitability. The SCM organization has a central core team of supply chain subject matter experts and execution teams operating under different business divisions across the country . Business Model Focus on core competencies and outsource the rest Airtel is probably one of the best run companies in India. It has advantages of both having a massive size and being in a very high growth industry. The secret of its enormous success owes a lot to its business model. Airtel focuses solely on two things: Customer acquisition & Servicing and business development/Expansion. The main focus of Airtel has been on Data IP solutions, conferencing and Video solutions and wants to grab the potential of market of these business sectors. The other functions such as hardware, network, backend applications (billing etc.), value added services and even telecom infrastructure are all outsourced. Airtel was the first player in India in pioneering such a business model. Airtel has outsourced its Network Management services to players like Nokia Siemens Networks and Ericsson, while its backend application is taken care by IBM. It was also the first to divest its hard assets, i.e. â₠¬â€œ its telecom towers – to a separate company and lease them back themselves as well as monetize surplus bandwidth by selling to other operators.