Bharti Airtel on Tuesday published figures to show it has become the world’s third largest mobile operator by subscribers.
The Indian telco has 303.1 million customers across its Asian and African operations, putting it slightly ahead of China Unicom, which claims 299.1 million, according to the latest published numbers from World Cellular Information Service (WCIS).
Bharti has added just over 53 million customers since it proclaimed itself the world’s fourth largest mobile operator – based on Wireless Intelligence data – in October 2012.
"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," said Bharti Airtel chairman Sunil Bharti Mittal, in a statement.
According to Bharti’s own figures, the telco group had close to 311 million mobile customers at the end of March, 73% of which were at its domestic operations. It had more than 76 million mobile customers in Africa and 8.6 million in South Asia.
In Tues day’s announcement, Bharti said its networks cover 1.85 billion people and carried 1.23 trillion minutes of calls and 333 petabytes of data in the financial year to the end of March.
Despite its growth, Bharti remains some way behind the world’s top two mobile groups.
China Mobile leads the way with 626.27 million mobile connections, according to WCIS, while Vodafone sits in second place with 403.08 million.
