I asked a mobile operator, I want a sim card, he said take Airtel.
I asked my uncle if I wanted a sim. He said Airtel.
From villages to top tier 1 cities, everybody knows how Airtel service is provided.
Yes, we are talking about India's iconic Airtel brand and its story.
Sunil Mittal was born in Punjab and his father is a popular politician and well-known personality. Sunil was never interested in politics and always chose business over his father’s legacy.
At an early age, after completing college, he started his first bicycle spare parts store. Unfortunately, he failed brutally as he had no experience and the margin was extremely low. Sunil Mittal was disappointed as it was the first start of life. Soon after a few years soon, he found a new opportunity. There were frequent power issues in shops, stores and houses.
Sunil mittal collaborated with japan-based suzuki generators and imported them to India. This investment made him extremely wealthy. Due to power cut issues, people desperately needed it. Things moved smoothly in life and his business was working effectively with profits, which he always aspired to. Soon, a tragedy hit when the government banned all imports of products manufactured in India. It had created a big failure for Sunil as his import business collapsed overnight. With deep shock and pain, Sunil became depressed.
Wandering with thoughts and dreams being failed. He went to Taiwan, where he saw push button mobile phones. It was the current trend back then. India used rotary phones, which were old, time-consuming and frequently had problems due to circular number dialing.
This idea clicked his brain and he imported and sold a push-button mobile which people admired well. Soon he began his own manufacturing unit, where he produced a new trend: pushing button phones to beetal phones.
He expanded it from manufacturing to exports, where his phones were in high demand.
During his vacation tour along with his family, he heard news that the government wants to give mobile network licenses to private entities.
Soon after hearing that news, Sunil came back from vacation and earned the license, but it was a difficult task.
He established his Bharti Cellular Limited and later launched the Airtel brand.
During his establishment he faced a lot of debts, as it was difficult in those days to get loans. Today it is easy to get a loan but during that situation people had difficulty. He collaborated with Nokia and Ericsson, then his company moved ahead from the barriers of technical issues.
Challenges
*BSNL launched its independent platform purely backed by the government. It gave low-cost affordable prices, whereas Airtel was private.
*Jio entered the market where all the markets of the telecom industry failed, including Airtel. But Airtel still took firm steps and reestablished its credibility fight along with JIO. Within 170 days, they gained 10 crore followers, which shocked everything.
*Airtel entered stock markets for funding, introduced them to the BSE and NSE.
Despite all these challenges, with multiple ups and downs, Airtel stood firmly and became India's one of the biggest telecom industry brands. It has almost 600 million across 20 countries.
