Profile: An earnest entrepreneur

06 November 2004

Uday Chatterjee profiles Sunil Bharti Mittal, winner of the Ernst & Young 'entrepreneur of the year' award

Sunil Bharti Mittal, chairman of the Bharti group of industries is a man who thinks big and talks straight. The door of the conference room of his Dehli office is inscribed in capital letters with the words 'sultanate 1.' That's thinking big for you.

Recently, a television channel asked him how the result of the American presidential election would affect the outsourcing business. He shot back: "It will not. The whole thing has been blown out of proportion." That's talking straight.

In 1976, when he was just 18, he ventured into the world of business. He set up a bicycle parts unit in his home town in Ludhiana with a modest investment of Rs20,000. He then dabbled in knitwear and utensils before moving his base to Delhi and Mumbai.

Here, he dabbled in the import and distribution of goods, mainly portable generators. So thorough was his grasp of the business that he is said to have committed nearly all the convoluted regulatory sections of the voluminous Export-Import Handbook to memory. In 1983-84, he set up his first company, Bharti Healthcare, manufacturing capsules.

This versatile personality's romance with the telecom world happened purely by accident. In 1983, imports of several products were banned, including portable generators, which Mittal used to import. So he tied up with Siemens to manufacture push-button telephones for the German company.