The magic figures are conjured out of no where. No one has done a head count nor audited their records. It is a fucking company’s claim and everyone is taking it on the face value. Assholes indeed!!
If Airtel is the “largest” mobile service provider, kudos to it for keeping the mobile number portability in abeyance. I know of several people who would be glad to shift over to a new service provider given the choice.
Airtel is desperate to scale up the economies. It knows for sure that it cannot survive alone on it’s laurels and needs to expand in the next growth oppurtunity in the rural areas. That is logical because that’s the only area that is untapped. Of course, much like the “soul harvesters”, Airtel can only expand in untapped markets and avoid the overtly saturated urban areas.
In addition to that, make it’s books look sexy so that it could sell itself off to the highest bidder. I have a feeling that Airtel would exit from the telecom business and solely focus on retail for the “next growth” and adopt the same tactics as it employed in selling crappy mobile phone services. Of course, it could exit out with a HUGE profit in tow…. one of the American companies like AT&T or it’s ilk would be interested to set a foothold in India.
It helps to have Sunil Bharti Mittal in the thinktank of “FICCI“; they help to “steer the nation for prosperity”. I am sure that their “political donations” helps to keep the frigging audit trails off their back and any kind of a probe in the “real numbers”.
100 million is a huge number but given the ever expanding population of this vast nation, it seems that only one tenth of the population is covered. By any account, if Airtel wants to attract more customers to it’s fold, it has to set a minimum threshold for the customers to stick to it. For example, it could sell ultra cheap netbooks with a locked in high end phones. Instead of being “re sellers” for the utterly useless iPhones, it could deal with the likes of Nokia to sell the uber cool E series and address a price sensitive market to mature towards higher end phones.
If they think that by selling “customised phones” with pre loaded music works, they are probably licking a horses’ ass and surviving solely on it’s dung. Thats the quality of their services and I am sure no one gives a middle “F” about it. Their marketing strategy sucks, in my humble opinion,and none of them is wiser about it.
The next 100 million customers, if the numbers are right, would solely come from adpating to the changing marketing scenario. It’s easier, nodoubt, to pointificate, and call the Airtel guys as morons, but again in my humble opinion, I am not way off the mark. They swing from being utterly confused idiots to demented nincompoops.
All the best Sunil Bharti Mittal!
