Bharti to seek more clients for its undersea cables

Bharti Airtel, India's largest telecom company, will expand its submarine cable offerings globally to target business opportunities in over 100 countries by 2013, its chief executive Sanjay Kapoor told a newspaper on Thursday.

''Currently, our undersea cable network touches 50 countries. This means we can pick up traffic from these countries. We are looking at carrying traffic for telcos in over 100 countries. We may not pick up licences or have points of presence in each of these countries, but we will have to target customers in 100 nations by 2013,'' Kapoor said in an interaction with The Economic Times.

Bharti has invested over Rs2,500 crore in its undersea cable business over the past three years. It either has stakes or has bought capacities in 18 cable systems across the globe. Over the past two years, Bharti has also joined all the major Asian and global upcoming undersea cable consortiums that link with India.

The telco has also bought stakes in five new undersea cable global consortiums that will become operational from 2010-end onwards.

''Our focus markets will be South East Asia, Asia-pacific region, Middle East and Africa. As the world moves towards bigger IP-based domains, we want to be at the leading edge of that opportunity,'' Kapoor said.