Word: delhi
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...launching a discount national cellular service. Industry experts say the market is becoming too crowded given India's relatively poor population?and Mittal is fighting on too many fronts. "He's chewed way more than he can eat," says an executive at a foreign telecom firm in New Delhi. "If I were Sunil Mittal, I'd be very nervous right...
...Mittal smelled another opportunity, one potentially bigger than those that had come before. The Indian government was awarding licenses for mobile phone services for the first time, and two years later Mittal secured rights to serve New Delhi. "We were a tiny company," remembers his brother Rajan, a managing director at the firm, "but we knew we had to take a shot." Right away Bharti went head-to-head with India's industrial titans. The other Delhi operator was controlled by Essar Group, a steel-making giant. But Mittal found ways to compete. He convinced European telecom equipment-maker Ericsson...
...Today, Bharti controls 54% of the Delhi market, India's largest. One former Essar executive said Bharti's secret was focus. While management at Essar, a conglomerate in numerous businesses, didn't have their eye full-time on the telecom market, Mittal "was never distracted by anything else," the executive says...
...also caught some breaks. In the mid-1990s, Bharti was unable to expand out of Delhi because the company lost bids for licenses in other markets. "People thought we would be a bit player," Mittal says. That proved to be a blessing in disguise. His competitors miscalculated. In a country where per capita income is only about $450, a mobile phone is beyond the reach of most of the population. After bidding high sums to get the licenses, carriers found they were unable to meet overly optimistic revenue projections. They couldn't pay their license fees to the government...
...with a franchise in Calcutta, the capital of West Bengal state, and asked if they were interested in a deal. At the time, Bharti was considering an independent bid for a license to serve the area. The deadline was the following Monday. The two sides met at Bharti's Delhi offices. Mittal and his top managers worked 20-hour days negotiating; some of his staffers napped on the conference tables while the documents were being drawn. First thing Monday morning, Mittal handed $90 million to Spice and put managers on a plane to take control of Spice's Calcutta operation...