News

New Delhi: In order to retain the leadership in the telecom market, Bharti Airtel has decided to invest $8billion by 2010 to have a 25 per cent market share.

"By 2010, estimates are that India will have a subscriber base of 400-500 million. Bharti strives to retain up to 125 million or 25 per cent of the market," PTI quoted Sunil Mittal as saying.

The aggressive expansion programme assumes importance in the wake of imminent entry of global mobile leader Vodafone through acquisition of Hutch-Essar.

Since its inception the company has made an investment of about $8 billion (about Rs 36,000 crore) for various services, including mobile, basic, national and international long distance, undersea cable and broadband services.

"We are spending nearly $2billion every year as the future in terms of creation of infrastructure continues to be stronger than the past by 2010, we would have doubled the investment.”

"We had put up about 10,000 base stations by 2005 end, another 10,000 by 2006 and this year (2007-08) we would add about 20,000," he said.

Stating that Bharti has a subscriber base of about 34-35 million, Mittal said based on annualised figure of last quarter, revenues would be touching $4billion (Rs 18,000 crore) this year and could double by 2010.