Airtel merges mobile and fixed line businesses

New Delhi, Feb 28: Private sector telcommunications company, Bharti Tele-Ventures yesterday (Feb 27, 2006) announced the merging of it's mobile and fixed line businesses, while informing that an integrated structure will be responsible for all aspects of its telecom business in India.

Current president of the mobile business, Manoj Kohli has been appointed president of Bharti Airtel, the proposed new name of the company with the new structure, to lead the unified management of the company.

"The new structure will help us transition towards a customer focused organisation while building sustainability and scalability to seamlesly manage 100 million customers and beyond", said Sunil Bharti Mittal, the Chairman and Managing Director of the company.

A press release of the company said, the new organisation structure is in pursuant to the comany's vision announced in October last year of making Airtel the most admired brand in India.

As a result of this massive restructuring, top-level changes are taking place, along with new role definitions and job rotations.

Manoj Kholi will lead the Airtel Managment Board which will have the overall responsibility of driving the strategy and the operational performance of Bharti Airtel. The Airtel Managment board will consist of three joint presidents and Sarvjit Dhillon who will take over as Director Finance and Busines Integration, Jai Menon, Director IT and Innovation. Hemant Sachdev will be the Director, Marketing. Atul, Bindal will continue to lead the South region, Jayant Khosla is being promoted as Director of the West Region and K Srinivas is being promoted as Director of the Eastern region after his successful stints in AP and Delhi circles.

Bharti Tele-ventures is one of India's leading private sector providers of Telecommunication services with an aggregate of over 18.62 million customers as claimed by the company.

The company claims that it is the only operator to provide mobile services in all the 23 circles in India.

"The new organisation has been designed to enable strong corporate governance whilst ensuring operational freedom, through functional and matrix reporting relationships", Mr Mittal added.

UNI