Bharti Airtel sees room for growth in rural India

Sanjay Kapoor has taken over as chief executive of Bharti Airtel for India and South Asia on 1 March 2010 as against from 1 April 2010 as earlier planned (See: Sanjay Kapoor takes over as Bharti Airtel CEO ahead of schedule)

In an interview with CNBC-TV18, Kapoor speaks about the latest happenings in Bharti Airtel and the telecom sector, 3G on the horizon

CNBC-TV18 shares with domain-b, its exclusive interview with Sanjay Kapoor, CEO, Bharti Airtel, who speaks about the latest happenings in his company and sector.

Quantify in terms of customer growth, is it going to be 10 per cent -20 per cent and, if you could, tell us per customer whether the revenues go up or down as you go further?
Given the Indian scenario, which is overly heated with 14 competitors and overcapacity, I would not look at customer numbers in isolation. I would always view customer numbers along with revenue numbers or revenue growth to make some sense out of that because you have a lot of multiplicity and duplicity of sims in the market place and what is truly getting reported today is probably multiple sims and not unique customers.

So I would say if you have that in mind, I would easily out of the numbers that are getting reported probably discount about 50 per cent and the balance 50 per cent are probably real numbers. So the industry is still growing very fast even if you were to discount to that extent.

I would say given India's position today globally, even if you were to discount those reported numbers by 50 per cent and you look at the growth on minutes of use quarter on quarter, I think this is one of the fastest growing markets in the world even today and that makes it very uniquely poised.