Bharti Airtel will set up a joint venture with French telecom major Alcatel-Lucent to boost its fixed-line and broadband services in India. Alcatel-Lucent will hold a majority 74 per cent stake in the venture with Bharti holding the remainder, Bharti chief executive Manoj Kohli said.

Bharti Airtel Limited, a group company of the Sunil Bharti Mittal Group's Bharti Enterprises and one of Asia's leading integrated telecom service providers, has operations in India and Sri Lanka.

New Delhi-based Bharti controls about 24 per cent of the Indian mobile market with over 96.6 million customers, including 93.92 million mobile users, as of end March 2009.

Bharti Airtel Limited has been voted as India's most innovative company, in a survey conducted by The Wall Street Journal.

Bharti Airtel is structured into three strategic business units - mobile services, telemedia services and enterprise services. The mobile business offers services in India and Sri Lanka. The telemedia business provides broadband and telephone services in 95 cities, DTH services and has recently forayed into the IPTV services.

The enterprise business provides end-to-end telecom solutions to corporate customers and national and international long distance services to carriers.

Airtel's high-speed optic fibre network, spanning over 101,337 km, covers almost all major cities in the country. The company has two international landing stations in Chennai that connects two submarine cable systems - i2i to Singapore and SEA-ME-WE-4 to Europe.

Bharti Airtel Limited on Wednesday reported a 21 per cent rise in its net income for the quarter ended 31 March 2009 at Rs2,239 crore.

Consolidated total revenues for the quarter ended 31 March 2009 grew 26 per cent to Rs9,825 crore and EBITDA rose 23 per cent to Rs4,001 crore on a year on year basis. The cash profit from operations was up 25 per cent at Rs3,788 crore.

The revenues and net income for the full year ended 31 March 2009 was Rs36,962 crore and Rs8,470 crore, a growth of 37 per cent and 26 per cent, respectively over the same period last year.