Sunil Mittal: Customer is the heart of business

Category: Airtel | No Comments | Posted on April 29, 2006

Irving Wladawsky-Berger blogs about a talk given by Bharti’s Sunil Mittal at IBM’s 2006 Business Leadership Forum held in Rome.

He explained that, with India’s annual per capita income only a bit over $600, cellular phone service has to be provided for the Indian market at a very low price, around 2 cents a minute or less. The only way to provide telecom services so inexpensively and run a profitable business is to take advantage of India’s large population and economic growth, scaling up the business rapidly by adding many new customers every month.

To do this, Sunil Mittal had to develop a radically innovative business model: focus only on the customers and outsource just about everything else. In other words, put all the energy of the business into attracting, supporting and retaining customers and accept the fact that pretty much everything else has been commoditized and should be outsourced, including managing all the IT equipment and the network. He said there was a lot of resistance to this strategy. People were calling him from around the world saying that IT and the network were the heart of a telecom company. “You cannot give your heart away and then run a business

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