We are still market leaders in the wireless industry in India

How did you perform in FY11, and what're your plans ahead?

It has been a challenging and good year for Bharti airtel. We sustained our market leadership position in the wireless industry in India with revenue market share of more than 30% in a highly competitive market where the number of players have grown from 6 to16. Our revenue grew 11% y-o-y in FY11 while sustaining EBITDA despite significant rate drops and irrational pricing.

How has Bharti airtel performed in the enterprise business?

We are on the transformational journey from core carriage to managed services to create value on top of our basic customer offerings and to further strengthen our product portfolio. In line with this we entered into strategic partnership with various leading global players like VMware, Savvis, EMC, and Cisco. In order to offer much anticipated diversity, increased redundancy, and network resilience to our global customers we further expanded our global footprint. With the launch of India-China terrestrial link in association with China Telecom, we have established the third international gateway for our customers. We are one of the major investors in IMEWE and EIG cables and both went live last fiscal.

How has the Telemedia division performed in FY11?

Wireline as an industry has declined by 6% (subscriber basis) but we have used this period to significantly strengthen the non-voice side of our business. Today, 95% of our acquisitions in the B2C segment are coming with DSL. The DSL penetration in B2C is now in excess of 80%. We have also enhanced our non-voice product portfolio in SMB business with offerings such as MPLS, ILP, and various SaaS products. All the above has translated into a healthy growth in our non-voice revenues.

How has Bharti airtel performed in 3G?

We have now rolled out in all 13 circles where we have 3G licenses. Currently, we have over 3 mn users. From an industry perspective, we foresee a huge amount of acceleration on how the ecosystem will shape up to address 3G market requirements-more handsets, applications, content, and improved access are now on the charts. Having successfully completed our initial rollout plans, we are now trying to cover more areas (C and D category towns) where we have seen good traction of Edge services.

How has been your performance in NLD and ILD segments for FY11?

Overall, FY11 has been very good for us. Last year some of the key focus areas were net revenue maximization, growth in long distance transit traffic, leveraging the available infrastructure which propelled us to emerge as successful and serious long distance transit player in the market. On the ILD front we clocked over 12 bn minutes which took Bharti airtel amongst the Top 15 carriers across the world.