Click to play videoMumbai: Sunil Mittal, chairman and managing director of Bharti Airtel, may soon get to run the world's largest emerging market telecom player: Bharti-MTN. Though talks are still on, he says the journey till here was riddled with problems. not least regulatory hurdles and spectrum starvation.
“That was a period when services were allowed to be brought in through different varieties, different ways and the competition was unjust, unfair, regulation was stacked against us and for a company which was just about to begin making an impact on the country had a moment of near death,” says Mittal.
Mittal may well have been alluding to the grant of all-India roaming to wireless local loop (WLL) and the unified access license (UAS) which let companies like Reliance Communications and Tata Teleservices, among others, to offer all-India services and enter the GSM space by paying only Rs 1648 against many millions spent by GSM players for license in various circles across India.
In an interview to CNBC-TV18, Mittal said regulations favoured a particular company but he does respect Reliance's determination..
“Well you know we may be a real paradox of sorts here. we have had very poor hands dealt to us in the last five or six years. Successive regulatory moves have gone against us. If you start tracking each one of those you know there have been sort of unfair to us and at the benefit of perhaps someone else,” he told Vir Sanghvi in the interview.
Sanghvi asked him: “Many people go up against big well connected companies and assume they have no chance. You are not Sunil Mittal today as you were then. What is the message then, how do they do it? How do they fight big companies, how do they well connected companies, how do they fight a regulatory environment that may not necessarily be fair?
“I would say that having faced that competition, Reliance is a determined lot. They are passionate about what they do, they are very intelligent in their businesses. I have to say in all fairness, the telecom network that they launched--at that time Mukesh was leading the charge--it is unprecedented. We were doing incremental stuff and they came in and said we will lay out 80,000 km of fibre. We have the best NOC in the country, and in about 18 to 24 months they had a network which is unparalleled,” Mittal replied.
And as he stands at the verge of creating telecom history, Mittal may only wish all the effort was well worth it.
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