Bharti Airtel Limited

Who owns Bharti Airtel?

It is a public company controlled by founder Sunil Bharti Mittal's family through Bharti Enterprises, with Singtel as a major strategic shareholder. The remaining shares trade on the NSE and BSE.

Is Bharti Airtel publicly traded?

Yes. It lists on the National Stock Exchange (BHARTIARTL) and Bombay Stock Exchange (532454). Its African subsidiary Airtel Africa is separately listed in London.

When was Bharti Airtel founded?

It was incorporated in July 1995 by Sunil Bharti Mittal after winning one of India's first private cellular licences for Delhi, and it launched Airtel mobile service that year.

How many customers does Bharti Airtel have?

Approximately 666 million across 15 countries as of March 2026: about 482 million in India and 184 million in Africa, plus smaller operations.

What was Bharti Airtel's FY2025-26 revenue?

Consolidated revenue was Rs 2,109,728 million, about Rs 2.11 trillion or roughly $25 billion, up 16.2% year on year, with EBITDA of Rs 1.21 trillion at a 57.5% margin.

Sunil Bharti Mittal began building telecom businesses in the 1980s, manufacturing push-button telephones through Bharti Telecom when India was still a state-monopoly market. The defining step came in 1995: Bharti Airtel was incorporated in July after winning one of the first private cellular licences for Delhi, and Airtel-branded mobile service launched that year.

The following decade was land-grab expansion. As India opened additional circles to private operators, Airtel built a national footprint and pioneered asset-light operations, outsourcing network equipment to Ericsson and Nokia Siemens and IT to IBM, a model that let it scale faster than capital budgets would otherwise allow. By the late 2000s it was India's largest mobile operator.

In 2010 the company made its boldest bet, acquiring Zain's mobile operations across 15 African countries for $10.7 billion. The deal transformed Bharti Airtel into a multinational overnight but took years to turn profitable. The African business was streamlined, rebranded Airtel Africa, and partially listed on the London Stock Exchange in 2019, with Bharti Airtel retaining control.

Reliance Jio's 2016 launch detonated Indian telecom economics, offering free voice and cheap data that collapsed industry revenue and drove most private operators out of the market or into merger. Airtel survived through tariff repair, premiumisation, and cost discipline, emerging with a roughly 37.7% wireless subscriber share and ARPU recovery to about Rs 257 by FY2025-26.

The company's other defining battle was regulatory. India's adjusted gross revenue case culminated in a 2019 Supreme Court ruling ordering operators to pay decades of disputed licence dues. Airtel's liability ran to tens of thousands of crores, paid through instalments, with the government later converting a portion of dues into equity and granting partial relief.

Through the 2020s Bharti Airtel invested in 5G rollout, fiber expansion, and adjacency: Nxtra data centers, Airtel Payments Bank, and a March 2025 agreement to distribute SpaceX's Starlink satellite broadband in India. FY2025-26 closed with consolidated revenue crossing the Rs 2 trillion milestone for the first time.

The relationship with Bharti Enterprises matters beyond shareholding. Bharti Airtel is the flagship of Sunil Bharti Mittal's wider private group, which also holds interests in financial services, insurance, real estate, and food through separately held companies. Those are siblings rather than subsidiaries: Airtel shareholders have no claim on them, but the Mittal family's control of the group flows through the promoter stake.

Airtel Africa's separate listing creates a partial sum-of-the-parts situation: the market prices the African operation independently in London while Bharti Airtel consolidates it, a structure that periodically draws investor attention to the gap between the parent's implied Africa valuation and the LSE price.

The defining regulatory episode was the adjusted gross revenue dispute, in which the Supreme Court ruled in 2019 that operators owed massive dues for underpaid licence fees and spectrum charges. Airtel's multi-year payment obligation reshaped its balance sheet and ended only with government conversion of some dues into equity and partial relief measures.

Earlier scrutiny included net neutrality backlash over the 2015 Airtel Zero zero-rating plan, which was withdrawn, and competition complaints during the Jio era that the Competition Commission of India examined. Data breach claims surfaced periodically, including a 2023 allegation of customer data for sale that the company denied.