India's largest private telecom company Bharti Airtel on Sunday said it has crossed the 75 million customer mark to become the fourth largest in-country mobile operator in the world.

Bharti Airtel is now behind China Mobile, China Unicom and American AT&T in terms of subscriber base, a company statement said.

The subscriber figure includes customers from all business units of the company, mobile services, telemedia services and enterprises services, the statement said. The mobile services devision has a customer base of 72.07 million as of July, 2008, it added.

The mobile business provides mobile and fixed wireless services using GSM technology across 23 telecom circles.
Commenting on the landmark Bharti Airtel CEO and Joint Managing Director Manoj Kohli said, "We are happy to have achieved this milestone of being the largest integrated telco in the country, in customer terms. For us, the benchmark of real leadership is customer delight and would like to thank all our customers for placing their faith in us."

The company had crossed the 60 million customer mark in February 2008 and the 50 million mark in October 2007, thereby becoming one of the fastest growing telecom companies in the world, the statement added.

China Mobile with 414.5 million customers as on June 2008 is at the No 1 position followed by China Unicom with 170.7 million subscriber base. AT&T is marginally ahead of Bharti with a subscriber base of 72.9 million in June this year.

Source:economictimes