Sunil Mittal is Fortune’s Asian businessman of the year

Posted on | January 18, 2007 |

Sunil Mittal has been adjudged “Asia businessman of the year” by Fortune magazine for making Bharti Airtel the telecom leader in India.

This Fortune article talks about how he built a mobile-phone empire by turning outsourcing on its head.

The epiphany.

The more he pondered, the more Mittal doubted his ability to build out a network fast enough to keep pace with all that growth.

“I was meeting with people from Orange, Vodafone (Charts), and T-Mobile,” he recalls, sitting in a bungalow on the outskirts of Delhi that serves as Bharti’s headquarters. “And I saw that these were huge companies, hugely resourced. And it began to dawn on me: I have to be like them. But could I afford to be like them? We’d need to hire 10,000 people, maybe 20,000, within two years. Did we have the resources to do that? Were we the best company to attract that kind of talent? The answer, clearly, was no.”

Bharti’s outsourcing model was the solution.

But Mittal figured he never owned the network in the first place. “If something goes wrong with my switch, there’s no way anyone from Bharti can do anything about it. An Ericsson guy is going to have to come and fix it. I don’t manufacture it; I can’t maintain or upgrade it. So I’m thinking, ‘This doesn’t really belong to me. Let’s just throw it out.”

Sunil shares a belief regarding his core strategy of partnerships.

And he ascribes much of his success to his refusal to tie up with other Indian firms. “It’s very hard for two Indians to partner well,” he says.

I like this oft-quoted quote.

Bharti’s initial estimate of $25 million to build a network in Delhi was too low by a factor of four. Says Mittal: “People told me this was a business for companies with deep pockets. Had we known how deep, we’d never have tried it.

Also Read: The making of Sunil Bharti Mittal

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