Airtel ranked world's 3rd-larget mobile firm

Bharti Airtel, India's largest mobile operator by subscribers and revenues, has emerged as the third-largest mobile operator in the world in terms of subscribers.

The company has moved up one notch from its earlier position.

As per data published by World Cellular Information Service (WCIS), Airtel has 303 million mobile subscribers across its operations. China Mobile tops the chart with 626.27 million users and Vodafone Group comes next with 403.08 million, according to WCIS data.

China Unicom (299.09 million) and America Movil (274.14 million) are in the fourth and fifth positions.

''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, said Sunil Bharti Mittal, chairman, Bharti Airtel."

"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,''

Airtel's 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 FY 2014-15.

In India, Airtel has one of the largest mobile services offerings for customers including 2G, 3G, 4G, mobile commerce and other value added services.

Its distribution channel is spread across 1.5 million outlets, with network presence in 5,121 census and 464,045 non-census towns and villages in India covering about 86.8 per cent of the country's population.

Airtel has the largest rural mobile customer base in India with over 100 million mobile customers.

It also has India's widest 3G footprint, offering customers high-speed internet access and a host of innovative services like Mobile TV, video calls, live-streaming videos and gaming.

Airtel began operations in November 1995 in New Delhi and in less than two decades emerged as one of the top brands in the emerging markets with an unmatched scale and diversity of operations.

The company pioneered the low-cost business model based on outsourcing that has allowed it to expand its services rapidly and give customers affordable access to mobile telephony.