Word: mittal
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...Raising the money for his breakaway network expansion is one of those things. Mittal, a serial entrepreneur, is a master at attracting investments and getting loans in India, where capital has been in painfully short supply?a skill that is especially helpful when your rivals have more money than you. Bharti has garnered a total $1.2 billion of foreign equity investment, more than any other Indian company. Singapore Telecommunications has invested $650 million, and Warburg Pincus has a stake worth nearly $300 million, the private equity fund's third-largest overseas investment. Dalip Pathak, a managing director at Warburg...
...Early in his career Mittal was aware of the importance of leverage. After graduating from college in 1976, he set up a 25-employee bicycle-crankshaft factory in his hometown of Ludhiana in the northwestern province of Punjab. Part of the seed capital was $400 from his family?although his late father was a member of India's Parliament, he was no tycoon. After Mittal parlayed the business into one large enough to be creditworthy, he made sure to carry a table tennis paddle in his pocket whenever he visited his local banker. The manager loved to play, so Mittal...
...Subsequent ventures included an import business dealing in Japanese-made electric generators and one that, in 1982, furnished India with push-button phones (until then rotary dial was the norm). By the early 1990s, Mittal was making fax machines, cordless phones and other telecom gear...
...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...