Airtel becomes third largest mobile operator globally

The telecom giant has also achieved largest rural mobile customer base in India with nearly 100 mn mobile customers

Bharti Airtel has become the world’s third largest mobile operator with a total of 303 million subscribers. The top slot has been occupied by China Mobile with 626.27 million subscribers followed by UK’s Vodafone Group with 403.08 million subscribers.

While China Unicom is ranked fourth with 299.09 million subscribers, followed by America Movil with 274.14 million users.

According to data by World Cellular Information Service (WCIS), Airtel has over 303 million mobile subscribers across its operations and has moved up one position in the global rankings.

Bharti Airtel, which offer services across 20 countries, on Tuesday in a statement said it has become the third largest mobile operator in the world in terms of subscribers. “Airtel began operations in November 1995 in New Delhi (India) and in less than two decades it has emerged as one of the top brands in the emerging markets with an unmatched scale and diversity of operations,” the statement said.

Sunil Mittal, Chairman of Bharti Airtel, said, “This is a major landmark in the journey of Airtel and underlines the strength of our business model and our brand that is loved by customers across 20 countries.” Its mobile networks cover over 1.85 billion people across its operations in 20 countries and carried over 1.23 trillion minutes of calls and over 333 petabytes of data in FY15.