Part IThe Story
A Paper Cup in South Delhi
The coffee came in a paper cup. The rest of the scene argues against that detail: the sprawling room at Bharti's corporate headquarters in south Delhi, and the transaction due to be announced the next day. It was early June 2010. Bharti Airtel was about to confirm that it had bought the African mobile operations of Kuwait's Zain Group, fifteen countries in a single deal valued at $10.7 billion. It was the largest acquisition ever made by an Indian telecom company and the second-largest overseas purchase by any Indian firm, behind only Tata Steel's $13 billion takeover of Corus three years earlier. Sunil Bharti Mittal, fifty-two years old, sat across from a reporter from the Hindustan Times, drank from the cup, and delivered a line he had clearly used before.
"I started with Rs 50,000 in my pockets," he said. "Today, I'm signing a cheque of Rs 50,000 crore."
It is a good line, and like most good lines founders tell about their beginnings, it does not fully match the record. Nearly every other account, including several of Mittal's own, puts the original stake at ₹20,000, borrowed from his father in 1976 to manufacture bicycle crankshafts in Ludhiana. Some English-language profiles convert it to $1,500, and others to $250. The figure changes from one telling to the next. The shape does not: first the pocket, then the cheque. The arithmetic works out to a multiple of roughly ten million.
He told the reporter that he still worked sixteen hours a day. He gave credit, as he often does, to forces outside himself. He spoke of "some divine power," and of the Government of India, which had once pushed him in the right direction without meaning to. He could not have said what came seven years later. In December 2017, at a TiEcon event in Delhi, someone asked him which business decision he regretted most. He chose this one.
"If you pin me down to one," he said, "I would say in 2010 our decision to go to Africa was a bit rushed and that has taken 6-7-8 years and lot of resources and my personal time to fix that."
Within three years of the cheque, the company was in serious trouble. Quarterly net profit had dropped from ₹2,200 crore to ₹284 crore. Eight of the thirteen members of the Airtel Management Board had left. Interest payments on the African debt were consuming the earnings of the Indian business that was supposed to support them. Nine years after that, in a February 2026 call with investors, Mittal mentioned almost in passing that "some of the friendly investors were not happy" when Airtel went into Africa. Airtel Africa had since become a star performer, and he said it had helped hold up the Indian operations during the brutal years of 2016 to 2019.
So the paper cup sits at the center of three separate moments: the triumph, the mistake, and the vindication. These are three readings of one decision, separated by sixteen years, and Mittal was the author of all three. Any account of him has to keep that in view. He is a man who has been wrong in public about very large things, and who has more often been right about them in the end. He has also outlasted almost everyone who was in a position to tell the difference.
By the Numbers
From Crankshafts to Constellations
₹20,000Capital borrowed from his father in 1976 to make bicycle crankshafts
$10.7BZain Africa acquisition, completed June 8, 2010
$19BAirtel's market capitalisation at its 2019 low, by Mittal's own account
$100BMarket cap crossed on May 27, 2024; first first-generation Indian company to do so
650MAirtel customers in April 2026, the world's second-largest mobile operator
₹210,737 crBharti Airtel revenue, FY2026 (roughly $22 billion)
24.5%Bharti's stake in BT Group, completed December 16, 2024
A Surname Taken in Defiance
Ludhiana was founded in 1480 as a military outpost on the road between Delhi and Lahore. For most of its history it has been a place where things are made. In the nineteenth century the British introduced mechanical knitting machines. Over time the city became a production center for bicycles, sewing machines, and auto components. Then came Partition in 1947. Hindu and Sikh refugees from West Punjab arrived in large numbers and turned residential alleyways into improvised factories. By the 1960s people were calling the city the Manchester of India. That nickname was a compliment, with the provincial undertone that kind of compliment often has.
Sat Paul Mittal was born there in 1931. He was a Bania, and he married a Khatri. According to The Ken, the marriage across caste lines caused such an outcry that the family adopted a new surname: Bharti. The Guardian notes that the word derives from Bharat, the Hindi name for India. A family pushed out of one kind of belonging named itself after the country instead. The son would later put that name on a holding company and then on a telecom network carrying the voices of 650 million people. Sat Paul himself went into politics. He became a Congress Party fundraiser and served three terms in the Rajya Sabha between 1976 and 1992. In 1987 he received the United Nations Peace Medal from Secretary-General Javier Pérez de Cuéllar for his work on population control and development.
Sunil was the middle of three sons, born on October 23, 1957. He attended the Wynberg Allen School in Mussoorie and then the Scindia School in Gwalior, both boarding schools where the sons of influential families were sent to be shaped. He preferred cricket to books, and he has never pretended otherwise. "I was not good at studies at all," he told the Hindustan Times in 2010. "I didn't care much to work for anyone but wanted to start something of my own. My parents thought I would have made a good lawyer. Actually, so do I. I enjoy reading legal documents and papers. I think I have a knack."
That aside matters more than it seems. Much of what followed in his career would depend on reading the fine print of licence conditions, import schedules, and interconnection regimes. Those documents determine who may do what in a heavily regulated economy, and he read them more closely than his competitors did.
He finished his BA in economics and political science at Panjab University in 1976. India was then under the Emergency. Businessmen had little standing with a bureaucratic and political elite committed to socialism and the supremacy of the public sector. Controls were suffocating. Corruption, in the Economic Times's later phrase, was "rampant." He was eighteen or nineteen, depending on the source. He borrowed money from his father and set up a small unit making crankshafts for Ludhiana's bicycle makers.
Over the next four years he added two more plants. One made hosiery yarn. The other made stainless steel sheets, some of which went into surgical instruments. He rode the train to Bombay and sold the sheets himself in the bazaars, standing at counters where buyers had no idea whose son he was. By any reasonable standard the businesses were working. They were also, he slowly realized, a trap.
"I realised in about three to four years that I would always be a small supplier to some of these people because they would never let you grow," he told Business Standard in 2026, looking back fifty years. By "these people" he meant the established industrial houses, the families who already owned the large factories and the licences. "You had to break free from the established businesses into something new."
In 1980 he sold the bicycle-parts and yarn units and moved to Bombay. There he became a trader. He traveled across the country looking for buyers of imported stainless steel, brass, plastics, and zip fasteners. Few founding stories in Indian business are less glamorous than a man selling zips. It was the right education anyway. Trading taught him how imports moved through the system, which goods were permitted, which forms had to be filed, and which officials had to be persuaded. It also brought him into contact with large foreign companies.
The Government Pushed Him
In 1980 the three brothers, Sunil, Rakesh, and Rajan, founded Bharti Overseas Trading Company. The partnership has lasted ever since. The brothers have served in turn as vice chairmen of the group, with Sunil as the public face and the others running parts of the business. By the time he was being profiled as a global executive, Harvard Business School noted that none of his children worked at Bharti, but that he "works closely with his two brothers."
In 1982 a chance meeting with a Suzuki Motors salesman led to an exclusive agency. Bharti began importing Suzuki's portable electric generators, buying import licences from exporting companies in Punjab to do it. North India was short of power, and a generator was the kind of product that sold itself. By the end of 1982, by several accounts, Mittal had become the largest importer of portable generators in the country. His HBS oral history describes how much those early dealings with Japanese companies impressed him: how they "operated so succinctly at such a large scale," and how much decision-making authority they gave to their employees.
Then the government banned the import of generators. It happened overnight in 1983, apparently to protect two domestic manufacturers who had been given licences to produce them.
"I had to quickly think of making a living in something else," he said later. "I thought of going into television sets, VCRs." He went into telephones instead. His HBS oral history traces that choice to a trade show in Taiwan in October 1982, where he saw a push-button telephone for the first time in his life. In India at that point, a telephone meant a heavy rotary instrument, usually black, issued by the state after a wait that could last years. The push-button phone was faster, lighter, and new. It could not be imported.
His answer is the most often repeated story in his career. It shows the habit of mind that runs through everything he did later.
— Sunil Bharti Mittal, Harvard Business School alumni profilePhones were not allowed to be imported, but electronic parts were permitted. So we bought phones in Taiwan, disassembled them, put them in different cases, imported them as parts, and put them together. That is how India's first push-button telephone was born.
He named the first model Mitbrau. Bharti Telecom Limited was incorporated in 1985 and signed a technical agreement with Siemens AG of Germany to make electronic push-button phones under a new name, Beetel. By 1989 the company had a factory in Ludhiana with annual capacity of 200,000 units, which made it one of the largest domestic telephone producers in India. In 1990 he added partnerships with Lucky Goldstar and Takacom and began making cordless phones and answering machines. Fax machines followed.
The work was a constant fight with paperwork. "Back then, every year you would hold your breath when the export-import (Exim) policy came out," he recalled in 2026. "What was going to be allowed? What was going to be banned? It used to be a big event, just like the Budget." Telephone licensing sat with a body called the Directorate General of Technical Development. When the DGTD granted Bharti a licence to manufacture cordless phones, it set a limit of ₹2 crore in annual revenue. The cap was on the value of what he could sell, not the number of units. "It meant filing applications, sucking up to officials, explaining what you need to them," he said. "It was a pretty tough time."
He was at the DGTD office on the day it was abolished. That was in 1991, the year Finance Minister Manmohan Singh presented the budget that opened the Indian economy. "We couldn't believe it! You could import whatever you wanted, it was incredible," Mittal said. Before then, the Open General Licensing list had been short and closely watched, the small set of goods anyone could bring in without special permission. "Then suddenly somebody tells you the whole world is OGL… that was a huge thing." He described the budget speech as "Freedom Day for us."
Not everyone welcomed it. A group of established industrialists who came to be called the Bombay Club lobbied hard against liberalization. "Though I was very small in terms of my position or status, I was vocal against the Bombay Club," Mittal said. "You could clearly see that these people, who already were big industrialists, were trying to hold on to their turf."
He was thirty-three. In ten years he had been shut out three times: by scale in Ludhiana, by a ban in Bombay, and by a licence ceiling in Delhi. Each time he had found a different way through. The wall was about to come down, and he was ready to move.
How Deep the Pockets Went
In 1992 India decided to award four licences for private mobile telephone networks in its metropolitan circles. The bidding was for companies with large balance sheets, and the obvious contenders were the Tatas and the Birlas. Those are the multi-generational families whose histories fill volumes like Indian Businessman Biography: Ratan Tata, Dhirubhai Ambani. Bharti was a Ludhiana phone assembler that had spent the 1980s working around import rules.
The licence conditions included one Mittal could not meet on his own: bidders for the Delhi licence needed experience operating a telecom network. So he went looking for that credential abroad. He formed a consortium with SFR, the French mobile operator under the Vivendi group, along with Emtel and MSI. He won the Delhi licence. The government did not approve his plans until 1994. Bharti Cellular launched GSM service in Delhi in 1995 under a brand called AirTel. Airtel's official founding date is July 7, 1995.
His father died in 1992, of cardiac arrest according to one account, in the same year the bid was made. Mittal rarely talks about it in public.
Delhi turned out to be a fight. Bharti had one major circle and faced the Essar Group there. It was surrounded by conglomerates and foreign multinationals with access to capital that Bharti did not have.
— Sunil Bharti Mittal, as quoted by The Economic TimesPeople told me this was a business for companies with deep pockets. Had we known how deep, we'd never have tried it. We begged, we borrowed, we stole, but we put the project together fast.
The quote is often presented as a confession of naivety. The HBS oral history suggests he actually had a method. Small companies stay away from "deep pocket" industries like telecom because they assume a huge initial investment is required. Mittal looked at it in modular terms. "You can start with a 10,000-line exchange and a few base stations," he explained, and then grow according to performance. He did not try to buy a whole network in one go. He bought the next piece, and when that piece worked, he bought another.
Madhya Pradesh is the clearest example. When Bharti bid for the state's basic fixed-line licence, critics, as he later told Rediff, mocked the choice: "the Bhartis, jilted from Punjab, have gone to a lousy state - 'Madhya Pradesh is no Maharashtra or Gujarat'." He looked at the numbers differently. The headline population of 70 million was misleading, he said, because 30 to 40 million people "struggle for clothing and shelter." The relevant figure was 16 million urban residents, two and a half times as many as in Punjab, along with a vehicle base twice Punjab's. His team picked twenty-three towns and cities and went to the state development lenders IDBI and IFCI. The bankers' first response, in his paraphrase, was blunt: "MP, fixed line, no sex appeal, no value, nobody wants to put the money."
They funded it anyway. By early 2000 Bharti was signing up 10,000 to 15,000 new customers a month in Madhya Pradesh, more than the state's own Department of Telecommunications. Its revenue per line was ₹1,400, against ₹800 for the DoT. "This may well become the first fixed line project anywhere in the world to break even in the second year," he said. He also spoke of "divine intervention" that had "saved us twice from overpriced bids for territories." Read closely, that was a gracious way of describing his own refusal to pay prices he considered unjustified.
The National Telecom Policy of 1999 brought large concessions to operators who had overbid for licences and could not pay. The industry argued for months over whether it would happen. Bharti did not join in. "We said who cares?" Mittal told Rediff. The company had paid every licence fee due, "according to the dotted line." That restraint earned him credibility with the government, which he would draw on later.
Everything But the Customer
In 2000 Singtel bought a stake in Bharti for $400 million. Bharti then had an established Asian telecom partner and a source of capital, and Singtel eventually became co-owner of the Bharti Telecom holding company that controls Airtel. The same year Bharti launched IndiaOne, a service intended to cut long-distance tariffs. Mittal had already predicted where long distance was going: "Long distance will become a commodity. It's a monopoly now. Give it in the hands of four people, they will bash it to death."
In February 2002 Bharti went public through India's first fully book-built IPO. Its mobile subscriber base had just passed two million. Around the same time came what Mittal later described as "a scary 12 months." The government was allowing fixed-line operators to offer "limited mobility" services that competed directly with cellular networks, without paying the licence fees cellular operators like Bharti had paid. Reliance had arrived in the market. Bharti was, in Mittal's own words, "a machine that was creaking."
— Sunil Bharti Mittal, to The Economic TimesIt could have gone either way. Everybody expected the other side to win. We were losing people. We were very clear that exit was not an option. We knew we had to make history or we would be dead.
Akhil Gupta was beside him through that year. Gupta, a chartered accountant, had worked with Mittal since 1994 and was so close to the family that business journalists called him the fourth Bharti brother. He handled the numbers, and he was the person who could explain any part of the business calmly and logically. Later he wrote a management book, Some Sizes Fit All, arguing that a few business fundamentals hold regardless of geography or sector. His description of his partner was short and accurate: "Sunil gets to the bottom of the problem without going around in circles."
The company survived, and in 2004 it made the decision that defined the rest of the decade. Bharti outsourced the management of its network to Ericsson and its information technology to IBM. These were the core operations of a telecom company: the machinery, the switching, the billing, the systems that make a call connect and a bill arrive. Most operators considered them the business itself. Bharti handed them to suppliers and paid according to capacity and performance. That turned what would have been fixed capital costs into variable ones. Gupta's book later used the arrangement as a case study, and it became standard practice across the industry. In the Bharti view, a phone company did not need to own the radio equipment. It needed to own the customer.
Mittal had laid out the reasoning years earlier, in the long Rediff interview of February 2000. "If I have my own pipe, my customers will never leave me," he said, and he explained that the dial tone would become a form of loyalty in itself. "Even if the dial tone is more expensive, it has been seen that 80 per cent of the people don't change because it is too much of a hassle." He did not need to own the switch. He needed to be the dial tone.
So Airtel put its money into what customers actually experienced. In July 2004 it became the first operator in India to offer caller ring-back tones, under the name Hello Tunes. Its signature tune, written by A. R. Rahman, became the most downloaded piece of mobile music in the world, with more than 150 million downloads. By 2004 Airtel was India's largest mobile operator. By 2005 it operated in every Indian telecom circle. It passed 50 million customers in 2007, and in 2009 it became the first company in India to pass 100 million.
The 2007 decision with the longest consequences involved towers, the steel structures that make a mobile network possible. Bharti moved its towers into a subsidiary, Bharti Infratel. In November 2007, together with its competitors Vodafone Essar and Idea Cellular, it also created a joint company, Indus Towers, to provide shared infrastructure to all operators on a non-discriminatory basis. The rivals would compete for customers while hanging their antennas on the same masts. Infratel went public in 2012 and raised $760 million. In November 2020 it merged with Indus to form one of the largest tower companies in the world, with 192,874 towers by one later count. In June 2024 Vodafone sold its remaining stake, and Indus became a direct subsidiary of Airtel.
The HBS alumni profile summed up his approach this way: "Instead of working against his rivals and duplicating efforts, he creates win-win opportunities." Mittal summarized it with a more combative maxim: "First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then they lose."
Marrying Up
Mittal's interest in Africa began much earlier than 2010. In 1997 he was in Botswana trying to close a deal, and he remembers the date precisely. "I remember sitting there celebrating my 40th birthday," he said. The deal fell through. The next year Bharti launched mobile services in the Seychelles, off the East African coast, and became the first Indian company to offer telecom services abroad. He also ran the international gateway there. "Even there, we have slashed the prices by two thirds and are still profitable!"
The Seychelles was not the African mainland. That opportunity came, or appeared to, in May 2008. Reports said Bharti was in talks with MTN Group of South Africa, which operated in twenty-one countries across Africa and the Middle East. The Financial Times reported that Bharti was considering an offer of about $45 billion. It would have been the largest overseas acquisition ever made by an Indian company. The Economist noted the reversal of roles: MTN had more subscribers, more revenue, and a wider footprint. "If anything," it wrote, "Bharti would be marrying up."
MTN agreed with that assessment. As negotiations went on, it tried to restructure the deal so that Bharti would end up close to being a subsidiary of the combined company. The talks broke down. They resumed in May 2009 with an exclusivity period, which was extended twice and finally expired on September 30, 2009. The final sticking point was dual listing. The proposed company would have traded in both Johannesburg and Mumbai, and Indian law did not permit that. Two attempts to become a global company had ended on a technicality in Indian corporate law.
"I was disappointed, yes," he said of the MTN failure. "But I also learnt a lot."
Eight months later he bought Zain's African operations. The business had been assembled by a Kuwaiti operator from the remains of several earlier companies. The Kenyan arm had been Kencell, then Celtel, then Zain, and it would soon be Airtel. The Nigerian unit had launched in August 2001 as Econet, the first commercial GSM network in Nigeria. It then passed through Vodacom management, became Vmobile, was bought by Celtel in 2006 and by Zain in 2008, and in 2010 received its sixth name. These were companies with a history of being renamed, and so was the family buying them.
Reuters reported the cash component of the deal at around $9 billion, with Zain receiving about $7.9 billion in cash while Bharti assumed $1.7 billion in debt. The headline number, the one on the cheque Mittal described over coffee, was $10.7 billion. The deal closed on June 8, 2010, and made Airtel the fifth-largest wireless carrier in the world by subscribers. In the next reported quarter, revenue rose 53 percent to $3.2 billion, with $911 million from Africa. Net profit fell 41 percent, from $470 million to $291 million, as interest on the new debt rose by $106 million and spectrum charges in India rose by $188 million.
On November 18, 2010, Airtel adopted a new identity: a lowercase "a" logo designed in London and a new version of the Rahman tune. Within five weeks the lowercase brand had been rolled out across fifteen African countries, Sri Lanka, and Bangladesh, where Bharti had paid $300 million for 70 percent of Warid Telecom. Rebranding was easy. Running the business was not.
African markets lacked the density that had made the Indian model work, and the Indian playbook did not transfer neatly to Kinshasa or Lagos. By January 2013, according to The Ken, Bharti Airtel was in severe difficulty. Quarterly net profit had fallen from ₹2,200 crore to ₹284 crore over three years, a drop of 87 percent. Average revenue per user in India had slipped from ₹220 to ₹185. Eight of the thirteen members of the Airtel Management Board had left.
Mittal brought in someone from outside the industry. Gopal Vittal had spent his career in consumer goods at Hindustan Unilever, where the core discipline is selling soap and shampoo to a billion people in small packets at fractions of a rupee. He knew nothing about radio spectrum. He did know how to sell to very large numbers of people at very low price points, and that was the problem Airtel faced. He took over as head of Indian operations in 2013. Thirteen years later he was managing director, vice chairman, and chief executive of Bharti Airtel.
In Africa the corrections were slow and costly. Airtel sold its operations in Burkina Faso and Sierra Leone to Orange in 2016. It merged its Ghana business with Millicom's Tigo in 2017, and in October 2020 sold that business to the Ghanaian government for $25 million. It bought Tigo Rwanda for between $60 million and $70 million. In 2019 it listed Airtel Africa in London and Lagos. In March 2021 it sold minority stakes in its Airtel Money mobile-money business to TPG for $200 million and to Mastercard for $100 million.
"It is free cash flow positive," he said at TiEcon in December 2017, "but when I look I think if I would have conserved that energy, capital and energy, probably we would have been better place today in our home market." Then he added what may be his most important sentence on the subject: "Having taken that decision, you need to back it, you need to fix it. It's my job, it's my teams job to fix it."
He was saying this in December 2017, and the reference to his home market was not idle. By then the home market was under attack.
The Incumbent's Letter
Before that attack, Airtel made a misstep of its own. In February 2014 Gopal Vittal said that free messaging apps such as Skype, Line, and WhatsApp should be regulated like telecom operators. In August the regulator, TRAI, rejected a proposal from operators that app companies share revenue with carriers. In December 2014 Airtel changed its terms so that internet calling would be billed separately from ordinary data. At 2G rates the charge worked out to more than ₹10,000 per gigabyte. A few days later it introduced a 75 MB internet-calling pack for ₹75. There was an immediate public backlash online. On December 29 Airtel withdrew the plan.
In April 2015 it launched Airtel Zero, a platform under which app companies would pay for their users' data. Flipkart was reported to be the launch partner. Indian users responded by giving Flipkart's app one-star ratings on Google Play, and within days Flipkart withdrew. The company that had built its reputation by defeating incumbents was now cast in the role of the gatekeeper. By then Mittal's son Kavin had been running Hike Messenger for more than two years. It was a free messaging and internet-calling app, exactly the kind of product Airtel's management had wanted to regulate.
Reliance Jio launched in September 2016. It was a new 4G network funded by India's richest family, and it offered voice calls for free and data at prices that analysts had considered impossible. In October 2016 TRAI recommended penalties totaling ₹3,050 crore against Airtel, Vodafone, and Idea for failing to provide Jio with enough interconnection points. In February 2017 Airtel acquired Telenor's Indian business in a deal with no cash payment, assuming spectrum obligations worth about ₹1,600 crore over ten years. In October 2017 it agreed to take over the Tata group's consumer mobile business for essentially nothing beyond some unpaid spectrum liabilities.
In July 2017 Mittal wrote a rare personal letter to the regulator. The question was the interconnect usage charge, the fee one operator pays another to complete a call on its network. The charge was then 14 paise a minute. Jio wanted to move to "bill and keep," under which the charge would fall to zero. Because more calls flowed into the incumbents' networks than out of them, the new entrant was a net payer, and Airtel was a net receiver.
"I am at a loss as to why TRAI should be considering a 'Bill and Keep' regime in India as one of the options and break away from the globally well-established practice," Mittal wrote. "India should not be subjected to a regime which is alien to the mobile industry the world over." TRAI cut the charge to 6 paise.
Twenty-six years earlier, in 1991, he had stood in a government office and watched a licensing regime disappear, and he had spoken out against established industrialists trying to protect their position. Now he was writing to a regulator to protect a fee that a newcomer described as a toll. He would say his argument rested on principle, that each operator should be paid for work done. That may well be true. The newcomer's argument also rested on principle.
The worst period came next. "September 2016 was the Jio launch and 2018 was the time when I think the industry was in the most distress," he told the Economic Times in 2024. Ebitda had collapsed and tariffs kept falling. For the first time in many years Airtel was reporting losses, and its debt was high. "In March 2018, I still recall that you could sense a concern among the rank and file of the company. You could see it on the faces of professionals working at Airtel. Company after company was folding up — Tatas selling to us, three companies going into NCLT." The NCLT is India's insolvency court.
In September 2018 he asked for a meeting with Prime Minister Narendra Modi. He has since described that meeting as "the turning point," without saying much about what was discussed. Then, in October 2019, the Supreme Court ruled on the definition of adjusted gross revenue, the base on which licence fees are calculated. The ruling created huge retroactive liabilities for operators. Airtel's market capitalization fell to $19 billion, "which was lower than the money put in," he said.
Asked in December 2025 how Airtel had survived what he called the "tsunami" of its biggest rival, his explanation was mostly about restraint. He talked about financial discipline, heavy investment in the network, and refusing to join a price war that could have wrecked the whole industry. Back in November 2015 he had committed ₹60,000 crore over three years to Project Leap, a network rebuild involving more than 160,000 base stations and coverage for over 500,000 villages. He kept spending through the downturn and declined to cut prices further.
He had stated the underlying belief more than fifteen years earlier, in that same Rediff interview. People had told him he must be pleased that competitors were failing while Bharti did well. "But it doesn't work like that," he said. "Nobody is going to put money into me if the Indian telecom sector is in a bad shape." The interview ran under the headline: You can't survive as an island of excellence in a sinking sector.
In March 2020, during the pandemic lockdowns, he wrote an essay asking the government to recognize what telecom operators were doing. "Every time you pick up the phone to call, to send a message or a mail, or to watch a video or stream music," he wrote, "spare a thought for those who are out there managing your networks 24x7." It was a plea from a man who had spent forty-four years dealing with regulators.
On May 27, 2024, Airtel's market capitalization passed $100 billion. In the five years since its 2019 low, the company had added about $80 billion in value. Between the third quarter of fiscal 2014 and the fourth quarter of fiscal 2026, quarterly profit grew roughly twelvefold, to ₹7,325 crore. Mittal was careful about how he framed the milestone. Airtel was "the first first-generation Indian company to hit the $100-billion milestone," he said. Kumar Mangalam Birla's group had also passed $100 billion, but it was multiple companies and not first-generation. Reliance was "a second generation one." HDFC and the Tatas were "multi-generational." He separated the founders from the heirs precisely. He remained clear about which group he belonged to.
The Graveyard Behind the Crescent
Bharti's headquarters is called Bharti Crescent, at 1 Nelson Mandela Road in Vasant Kunj, Delhi. The address is a coincidence. It is also a convenient one for a company that went looking for a continent.
Not every venture that started in that building lasted. On August 5, 2007, Bharti and Walmart announced a fifty-fifty wholesale joint venture. Walmart was the largest retailer in the world and was trying to enter India through the one structure the law allowed. The first store, branded Best Price Modern Wholesale, opened in Amritsar in May 2009. Bharti also built a separate consumer-facing chain, Easyday, to sit on top of the wholesale operation. In October 2013, citing regulatory obstacles, the partners ended the venture. Walmart bought Bharti's half, which by then operated nineteen stores. In May 2015 Easyday's 216 stores went to Kishore Biyani's Future Group in an all-stock deal valued at about ₹500 crore.
The insurance ventures with AXA, founded in 2006 and 2007, followed a similar arc of high hopes and slow exits. In 2017 he said he would be "very happy" if Bharti AXA ranked in the top ten in both life and general insurance within five to seven years. The general insurance business was sold to ICICI Lombard in 2020 for shares worth a combined €664 million to the two partners. In 2026 Prudential agreed to buy a majority stake in the life insurance company. FieldFresh Foods, a fruit and vegetable venture started in 2004 with E.L. Rothschild and later joined by Del Monte, was merged into Agro Tech Foods in February 2025 in exchange for shares. Centum Learning went to upGrad in 2022.
Hike was the most personal of these. Kavin Bharti Mittal, one of Sunil's twin sons, launched the messaging app on December 12, 2012, with backing from Bharti and SoftBank. By August 2016 it had more than 100 million registered users. It was renamed Hike Sticker Chat in April 2019 and shut down in January 2021. It was a free messaging and calling app, the very category Airtel had once wanted regulated, and it lost to WhatsApp, the same competitor everyone else lost to. In late 2024 Airtel also closed Wynk, its music service of ten years, and moved all of its staff into the telecom business. Subscribers were offered Apple Music instead.
The pattern is consistent. Mittal enters many businesses and keeps few of them. When he leaves, he usually leaves in exchange for shares rather than cash, keeping a stake in a larger company. Retail became a holding in Future. Food became a holding in Agro Tech, now Sundrop Brands, where Bharti is the second-largest shareholder. Insurance became ICICI Lombard shares and then a sale to Prudential. Ventures that did not work were folded into other people's businesses.
Asked to name his biggest regret, he did not name any of these. He named Africa, which was the bet he kept.
A Knighthood and a Constellation
In 2015 Bharti became a founding investor in OneWeb, a London-based effort to deliver internet access from a constellation of low-earth-orbit satellites. The aim was to reach the villages that towers could not cover. In 2020 OneWeb filed for bankruptcy. Mittal assembled a $1 billion rescue consortium with the British government, then led by Boris Johnson, with Alok Sharma as business secretary. The government's participation was controversial. Bharti and Her Majesty's Government each took roughly half. Mittal became executive chairman of a satellite company whose remaining launches would use Russian Soyuz rockets and a rocket from the Indian Space Research Organisation. In 2023 OneWeb merged with France's Eutelsat, with Bharti as the largest shareholder and Mittal as co-chair.
Mittal had been building a connection with Britain for a long time, and now it was formal. Fortune India reported that he spends much of his time in the UK. Bharti's hospitality business, led by his son-in-law Sharan Pasricha, owns the Gleneagles hotel in Scotland and The Hoxton chain of "budget-luxe" hotels. On February 28, 2024, King Charles III made him an honorary Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire. He was the first Indian citizen to receive that honor from the King. On August 12, 2024, Bharti announced it would buy a 24.5 percent stake in BT Group, the former British state telephone monopoly, from Patrick Drahi's heavily indebted Altice. The purchase was submitted for review under the UK's National Security and Investment Act and completed on December 16, 2024. Bharti said it did not intend to make a full takeover bid.
The middle son from Ludhiana, whose family had renamed itself after the country, had become the largest shareholder in the telephone company of India's former colonial ruler. The Guardian's profile of him that August noted, almost as an aside, that his surname "might appear almost foreordained."
The succession is being planned with care. On February 26, 2026, on a call with investors, Mittal explained how the next generation was being prepared. "I believe I still have some years left to give back to Airtel and Bharti Enterprises but the next generation of my family are all building muscle in different forms and shapes," he said. His children ran their own businesses and were "seeing their own failures, successes, pain points." Shravin, Kavin's twin, worked in Airtel Africa's operations from the 2010 acquisition until 2012 and has been on its board since 2018. He was also involved in the OneWeb and BT transactions. Mittal described his "wish and desire" that Bharti Telecom, which then held about 41 percent of Airtel, would one day hold more than half again. That would require, he said, "very large dividends and or buyback." He also said Airtel Africa was "poised to be a USD 10 billion revenue company."
A month later he announced that he would step down as chairman of Airtel Africa in July 2026. His successor would be Gopal Vittal, the former consumer-goods executive brought in during the worst days of the Zain hangover. That year the GSMA gave Mittal its lifetime achievement award at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. In October, Shabnam Sinha replaced him as chair of Airtel Payments Bank. In 2017 he had described that bank as "a frugal bank where you go in rural-suburban people."
Ahead of him were other ventures: data centers, a partnership with Starlink, generative AI, and a target of ₹350 in monthly revenue per user, which he expects the market to reach eventually. He has been predicting such numbers for decades, and Airtel has usually reached them.
Behind him, in the city he left at twenty-two, Beetel Teletech still has its manufacturing unit in Ludhiana. It makes IT peripherals, mobile accessories, network equipment, and landline telephones. Each of those phones has a coiled cord, a plastic cradle, and a keypad with twelve push-buttons.
Part IIThe Playbook
The principles below come from fifty years of Mittal's choices, including the bad ones. They are not abstract virtues. They are the specific methods of an outsider who repeatedly found the gaps in systems designed to keep him small, and who later had to decide how to behave once he controlled part of the system himself.
Twelve Principles
- 1.Find the seam in the rule.
- 2.Let the wall that blocks you choose your next door.
- 3.Enter deep-pocket industries modularly.
- 4.Borrow the credential you lack.
- 5.Own the customer, rent everything else.
- 6.Share the steel with your enemies.
- 7.Run the numbers on the market others find unsexy.
- 8.Pay the dotted line; spend the credibility later.
- 9.Name the mistake, then stay to fix it.
- 10.Hire the outsider for the turnaround.
- 11.Refuse the price war; outlast the tsunami.
- 12.Exit into equity, and train heirs outside the house.
Principle 1
Find the seam in the rule
The import rules said telephones could not be brought into India. They did not say electronic parts could not. Mittal bought finished phones in Taiwan, took them apart, shipped the parts as components, and reassembled them at home. That was how India's first push-button phone reached the market. It was not cheating. It was a close reading of what the rule actually covered, by a man who says he enjoys reading legal documents and believes he would have made a good lawyer.
In a regulated economy, the competitive advantage often belongs to whoever has read the rules most carefully. Most entrepreneurs treat regulation as a wall. Mittal treated it as a document, and a document has gaps between what it prohibits and what it says.
Tactic: Before deciding something is impossible, get the exact text of the rule that blocks you and list everything it does not specifically prohibit.
Principle 2
Let the wall that blocks you choose your next door
The generator ban of 1983 took away a business in which he was the largest importer in the country. His response was to treat the ban as a signal about where to go next. "So, in a way you can say, the Government of India pushed me in the right direction." Ludhiana pushed him out by limiting his scale. The ban pushed him out of trading. The DGTD's ₹2 crore ceiling pushed him toward the larger opportunity that opened in 1991.
This is not the same as resilience in the motivational-poster sense. Mittal read each closed door as information. A ban showed what the state would protect. A ceiling showed which businesses the incumbents valued. He went where the barriers were coming down.
Tactic: When a policy or competitor shuts down a line of business, list what the closure tells you about where the powerful are not paying attention, and go there.
Principle 3
Enter deep-pocket industries modularly
"You can start with a 10,000-line exchange and a few base stations." Small companies avoid capital-heavy industries because they picture the full build-out. Mittal pictured the first piece. He also admitted that if he had known how deep the pockets needed to be, he would never have started. That admission matters. A modular approach is partly a strategy and partly a way of not being frightened off by the total cost.
The Madhya Pradesh fixed-line licence followed the same logic. He did not try to serve 70 million people. He chose twenty-three towns, served them, and broke even in the second year.
Tactic: Break your capital plan into the smallest unit that can prove demand, and fund only that unit before committing to the next.
Principle 4
Borrow the credential you lack
The Delhi licence required experience operating a telecom network. Bharti had none, so Mittal brought in SFR and Vivendi. When he needed manufacturing know-how, he partnered with Siemens. When he needed capital and an established telecom name, he brought in Singtel. Later partners included Ericsson, IBM, Walmart, AXA, Del Monte, and the British government.
Harvard's profile of him listed his "remarkable talent for partnering with others" as central to Bharti's growth. Behind the diplomacy was a simple calculation: the qualifications that keep outsiders out can usually be borrowed from someone who already has them.
B
Borrowed Credentials
Each partner supplied something Bharti could not yet build itself.
| Partner | What Bharti lacked | Outcome |
|---|---|---|
| Siemens AG | Telephone manufacturing technology | Scaled 200,000 units/year by 1989 |
| SFR / Vivendi | Operator experience required by licence | Scaled Delhi licence, Airtel launch 1995 |
| Singtel | Capital and telecom pedigree | Scaled $400M in 2000; co-owner of Bharti Telecom |
| IBM and Ericsson | IT and network operations at scale | Scaled Outsourcing model became industry standard |
| Walmart | Retail back-end and logistics | Exited Ended October 2013 |
| UK Government | Sovereign backing for a bankrupt satellite firm | Bet OneWeb rescue; Eutelsat merger 2023 |
Tactic: Identify the specific qualification that excludes you from a market and find a partner who has it, rather than spending years acquiring it yourself.
Principle 5
Own the customer, rent everything else
In 2004 Bharti outsourced its network to Ericsson and its IT to IBM, the operations most telecom companies saw as their core. Mittal had already concluded that owning the dial tone mattered more than owning the switch: "If I have my own pipe, my customers will never leave me." What he meant by the pipe was the relationship with the customer, not the hardware.
Paying vendors by capacity and performance turned fixed capital costs into variable ones. Management attention went to brand, distribution, and customer experience, such as the Rahman tune and Hello Tunes. It is the strategy of a former trader who never needed to own a factory to profit from what it made.
Tactic: List every function in your business and ask which ones a customer would actually notice if they changed; keep those, and contract out the rest on performance-based terms.
Indus Towers, created in November 2007 with Vodafone Essar and Idea Cellular, made fierce competitors co-owners of the steel that carried their antennas. Bharti's position was that operators compete on service, not on duplicate towers along the same highway. The arrangement became one of the largest tower companies in the world, and Bharti eventually owned it outright.
This is the less obvious side of Mittal's competitiveness. He fights very hard for customers and cooperates on infrastructure. Shared infrastructure reduced everyone's costs, which made the market bigger for all of them, and the operator with the best execution captured the most of it.
Tactic: Find the infrastructure you and your competitors are each paying to build separately, and propose a shared entity in which you hold the largest stake.
Principle 7
Run the numbers on the market others find unsexy
The bankers said Madhya Pradesh had "no sex appeal." Mittal ignored the headline population of 70 million and looked at 16 million urban residents, a vehicle base twice Punjab's, and revenue per line that eventually reached ₹1,400. The story was repeated on a larger scale in Africa. It was a rushed bet that cost eight years and much of his own time, and it later supported the Indian business when that business was struggling.
Unpopular markets are often cheap because nobody has bothered to break them down. A market's reputation comes from averages. Opportunities are found by segmenting.
Tactic: For any market that others dismiss, strip out the headline figure and rebuild demand from the segment you can actually serve.
Principle 8
Pay the dotted line; spend the credibility later
When the 1999 telecom policy rescued operators who had overbid and defaulted, Bharti had already paid everything it owed. "We had no licence fee obligation, everything was paid on according to the dotted line," he said. "So there was no scrambling or clamouring for concessions from our side. The result was that when we went and discussed issues with government, there was a huge amount of credibility."
That credibility was something he could draw on later: in the limited-mobility fight, in the letter on interconnection charges, and in the September 2018 meeting with the Prime Minister that he calls the turning point. In a regulated industry, a reputation for paying what you owe can be worth more over time than a concession won today.
Tactic: Meet regulatory obligations in full even when rivals are lobbying for relief, and keep a record so you can point to it when you need the regulator to listen.
Principle 9
Name the mistake, then stay to fix it
Few founders publicly say their biggest acquisition was a mistake while still running it. Mittal did so at TiEcon in 2017, and in the same answer he committed himself to the cleanup: "Having taken that decision, you need to back it, you need to fix it. It's my job, it's my teams job to fix it."
He did not sell Africa off cheaply. He pruned it. He sold Burkina Faso and Sierra Leone, merged Ghana and later sold it, brought in TPG and Mastercard to invest in mobile money, and listed the business in London. Nine years after describing the decision as rushed, he was calling Airtel Africa a future $10 billion revenue company. Admitting the mistake did not mean giving up on it. It was how the repair started.
⏱
The Near-Death Cycle
Bharti has faced an existential threat roughly once a decade, and each time emerged larger.
1983
Government bans generator imports overnight; Bharti's largest business disappears.
2002
Limited-mobility fight and Reliance's first entry: "a scary 12 months."
2013
Zain debt hangover; quarterly profit down 87%; 8 of 13 board members gone.
2016
Reliance Jio launches with free voice and very cheap data.
2019
AGR ruling; market cap falls to $19 billion.
2024
Airtel crosses $100 billion in market capitalisation on May 27.
Tactic: When a major bet goes wrong, say so publicly, then attach a specific repair plan and a named owner within the same statement.
Principle 10
Hire the outsider for the turnaround
In 2013, with the management board depleted, Mittal did not hire a telecom veteran. He hired Gopal Vittal from Hindustan Unilever, someone trained to sell to a billion customers in small units at very low prices. That was Airtel's actual problem. Its difficulty was not technical. It was a pricing and distribution problem dressed up as a technology problem. Thirteen years later Vittal ran the company and was named to succeed Mittal as chairman of Airtel Africa.
Mittal's own background helps explain the choice. He came into telecom as a trader, not an engineer. He understood that the important skills often come from adjacent industries where the same problem has already been solved under another name.
Tactic: Describe your crisis in industry-neutral terms, then hire from the field where that neutral problem is everyday work.
Principle 11
Refuse the price war; outlast the tsunami
When Jio arrived, Airtel could have matched it on price and bled out alongside the other operators who went to the insolvency court. Mittal described the alternative strategy as financial discipline, continued network investment through Project Leap's ₹60,000 crore program, and refusing to enter a price war that could have crippled the industry. Meanwhile Airtel absorbed failing competitors almost for free: Telenor with no cash, and Tata for the cost of its liabilities.
Behind this was a belief he expressed in 2000: "You can't survive as an island of excellence in a sinking sector." When the industry is in crisis, the healthiest company does not try to win the race to the bottom. It survives until there are fewer competitors, and then it raises prices for everyone.
Tactic: In a predatory price war, protect investment in quality, keep the balance sheet strong enough to buy distressed rivals, and wait for the market to consolidate.
Principle 12
Exit into equity, and train heirs outside the house
Mittal's failed ventures seldom ended as outright write-offs. Easyday became shares in Future Group. Bharti AXA General became ICICI Lombard shares. The food business became a stake in Sundrop Brands. Exiting for equity let Bharti keep exposure to the larger company it had merged into, without the burden of running a business it could not win alone.
He applies similar thinking to succession. His children were sent to build their own companies. Kavin built Hike and Shravin built Unbound. "Seeing their own failures, successes, pain points and managing conflicts," as he put it, before taking a larger role at the shareholder table. Hike failed. That failure was part of the training.
Tactic: When you close a venture, seek payment in the acquirer's stock, and require successors to run something you do not control before they inherit what you do.
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Part IIIQuotes and Maxims
In their words
— Sunil Bharti Mittal, Business Standard, 2026I realised in about three to four years that I would always be a small supplier to some of these people because they would never let you grow.
— Sunil Bharti Mittal, Harvard Business School oral history, 2017I have always been the kind of person who needed knowledge, and so rather than picking it up from consultants, like McKinsey and others, I was always willing to dive into new situations, learn, and bring knowledge back to the company.
— Sunil Bharti Mittal, Rediff Business Interview, February 2000Within our company we have often asked who will live if this sector dies? Lots of people say that you must be enjoying because everybody else is dying and you are OK. But it doesn't work like that. Nobody is going to put money into me if the Indian telecom sector is in a bad shape.
— Sunil Bharti Mittal, TiEcon Delhi, December 15, 2017Every entrepreneur comes to a point where you make some mistake and the only thing is that you should recognise it and try to fix it as fast as you can.
— Sunil Bharti Mittal, Harvard Business School alumni profileThere is an old maxim: First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then they lose.
Maxims
- Read the rule, not the reputation of the rule. Most prohibitions are narrower than they look, and the opportunity is in what the text leaves out.
- A ban is a map. When the state or a rival closes a door, it shows you where the powerful are not watching.
- Start with ten thousand lines. You can enter a capital-heavy industry one modular piece at a time, especially if you have not yet calculated the full cost.
- Borrow what you lack. Credentials, technology, and capital that keep outsiders out can usually be obtained through partnership.
- Be the dial tone. Own the customer relationship and treat everything behind it as something you can rent.
- Share the steel, fight for the subscriber. Cooperate with competitors on infrastructure and compete hard on service.
- Pay on the dotted line. A record of meeting obligations becomes credibility you can use when you need it.
- No island survives a sinking sea. Your company's health depends on your industry's health, so do not cheer when competitors fail.
- Say it was rushed, then fix it. Admitting a mistake publicly is the first step in repairing it, not the end of the story.
- Outlast the wave. In a price war, protect the balance sheet and the network, and buy competitors as they fail.
