Sunil Bharti Mittal, founder, Chairman and Managing
Director of Bharti Group can be labelled as the most
ambitious telecom entrepreneur in India. Sunil a
former student of Harvard Business School graduated from Punjab
University. The son of a parliamentarian, Sunil did
not want to follow his father's footsteps. He had
shown an interest in business even from his teenage
days. So after graduation, Sunil got
together with his friend and formed a small bicycle
business with borrowed capital in the1970s. But by
1979, he realized that this business would remain
small. So he moved out of Ludhiana, spent a few
years in Mumbai and in 1981, was running an import
and distribution operation out of New Delhi and
Mumbai
Bharti
Enterprises controls about 20 % of the Total Telecom
market in India . As he puts it , it was
a mixture of Vision , good luck and hard work
by a team of about 10 -12 senior people. The early
beginnings in 1985 were in manufacturing telephone
handsets. They did not have the expertise to do
telephone exchanges , jelly -filled cables had
become a commodity and their capital investment was
high.
Initially
52 companies were
licensed to manufacture telephones; Today only three
remain - Bharti , Tata and BPL. Between 1982-86
Bharti manufactured Fax machines, Cordless phones,
and telephones. SBM says that they stuck to
telecom although every entrepreneur was into paper
mills , steel mills, mini-cement plants, cinemas,
and hotels.
He
says they often went to Sam Pitroda for advice,
which was to wait
for the telecom sector to open up [ deregulate /
privatise ]. As a result SBM says they were always
looking ahead and
knew what was happening in the world markets
For 47-year-old Sunil Bharti Mittal, the Ludhiana
boy who started out as a bicycle parts dealer and
lived in New Delhi's upper middle class Azad
Apartments, it has been a long journey to what is
ostensibly the city's poshest, largest house.
As the country's undisputed telecom czar, he
straddles a Rs 8,000-plus crore (Rs 80 billion-plus)
empire which, like his house, he built from scratch.
But already Mittal is charting a new course. Not
content with being telecom's tycoon, he is giving
shape to a new thrust in non-telecom businesses. A
decade from now, he reckons, telecom may no longer
be the largest slice in the Bharti pie.
Over the next three months Mittal hopes to float
an equity fund with a large corpus (the extent of
which is still being decided, though Mittal says
money is not a problem), that will be used to fund
new businesses in emerging areas, to be run by
others.
This last is important because it points to the
direction -- and role -- Mittal is carving for
himself.
As the group has limited management time and
can't get into too many new businesses on its own,
it will fund others instead. "We can invest
anything up to 74 per cent, or only 26 per cent,
function as an incubator for entrepreneurs with new
ideas. . . the scope is endless."
This is different from what the group is doing
now. For instance, it has a stake in the Bank of
Punjab, "but it is a one-off deal and not
structured," Mittal says.
For a man who intends to step down as executive
chairman of Bharti Televentures -- his telecom
empire -- when he turns 50 three years down the
line, the push into new initiatives is hardly
surprising.
Taking his cue from the Tata structure, the new
Bharti structure envisages each business being run
independently by a CEO with the board looking only
at governance issues that cut across companies:
group strategy, finance and HR, for instance
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