Vodafone takes stake in Indian operator
Vodafone has targeted the rapidly-expanding mobile phone market in India today by paying £820m (€1.2bn) for a 10% stake in the country’s largest operator.
Vodafone picked up a stake in Bharti Tele-Ventures, the fastest growing wireless company in India with 14.1 million customers, or 22% of the market.
Mobile penetration is just 6% in India – compared with 100% or more in some parts of Western Europe – with 63.1 million out of 1.1 billion people using mobiles. Nearly 23 million of users in India bought their first mobile phone in the last 12 months.
Despite the low level of penetration, India is the third largest mobile market in Asia after China and Japan, where Vodafone already operates.
Bharti is one of three companies to operate across the whole of India, and its customer base grew 62% in the year to September 2005.
Vodafone said the deal offered them exposure in “a large under-penetrated market of global importance with significant growth potential”.
It follows Vodafone’s purchase of Czech and Romanian mobile operators earlier in the year.
Vodafone’s Indian-born chief executive Arun Sarin said: “We have been thinking about India for the last year or so and India is a fast growing economy. It is a large market with very low penetration of only 6%.
“One of the things we have learned around the world is that we have always under-estimated the desire for people to take on mobile phone services when the price is right.
“All around the world the need to communicate is a basic human instinct and I believe the number of mobile phone users in India will rise very smartly.
He added: “We are entering a relationship with a major company which understands, as we do, the enormous potential of mobile telephony.
