Stock Watch

The joining of Shravin Bharti Mittal, the son of Sunil Bharti Mittal in a managerial position is being seen as a succession process by many.

Bharti Airtel Ltd. is ready to pay 50,000 Euros a year to the graduate from the University of Bath in the UK who is the first family member to have joined the Company.

The holding Company for Bharti's international operations is Bharti Airtel International Netherlands.

Bharti Airtel, the leading telecom company, in a bid to target business opportunities globally is planning for the expansion of the submarine cable offerings, in over hundred countries by 2013 accroding to Sanjay Kapoor, the chief executive. He said that currently, as many as 50 countries are touched by the cable network of Bharti Airtel, giving it the ability to pick traffic up from all these countries. Although there are no plans of taking licenses or have presence points in all the countries, the idea definitely is to target 100 nations, according to Mr. Kapoor.

Leading telecom service provider, Bharti Airtel has said that it will offer free access to the popular networking site Facebook to all its subscribers for a period of two months.

The subscribers will be able to access the site and use various features without paying any data charge until August 31, according to Airtel. The more than 130 million subscribers of Airtel in the country will also be able to access the site initially in Hindi and English and later in Punjabi, Bengali, Telugu, Tamil, and Malayalam.

Facebook is the popular networking site and Bharti Airtel on Monday has announced that its users across the country are free to access this social networking site for coming two months (till August 31). Facebook's full mobile site can be accessed by Airtel subscribers at a faster speed and with no data cost via m.facebook.com.

One of India's top mobile service company that has recently entered into the African market with the acquisition in Zain, - Bharti Airtel, has aid that it is going to invest in Nigeria. The amount, it said, will be closer to $100 million.

Bharti is investing since it wants to improve not only its reach but also its quality of network in the nation by 2012.

Bharti, through its Zain takeover, has managed to take over mobile operations in 15 African countries and is now the No.5 in world in terms of number of subscribers.

It was since February, Bharti Airtel launched its App Central, subscribers seem to have been downloading the apps at a very good rate.

It was seen that a record download of 13 million in just four months, which roughly translates to 1.2 download every second, according to a report given out by Fonearena. com.

Atul BindalBindal, President-Mobile Services, Bharti Airtel stated: "Four months since it opened Airtel App Central continues its triumphant march, transforming into Smartphones the basic devices of an increasing number of Airtel mobile customers across the country.

Bharti Airtel Ltd. has informed that it has appointed Ogilvy Africa BV as its marketing services partner in Africa. Ogilvy Africa will be responsible for the marketing activities of Bharti Airtel Ltd. in 15 countries in Africa.

Bharti Airtel Ltd. has informed that it has already signed a deal with the company and soon it will be operative. As per the deal, Ogilvy Africa has to set up a specialist business unit in Africa.

The African Inc. has also announced the name of this unit. It is ‘Team Airtel’ and it has been dedicated to Airtel.

The Bharti Airtel’s App store has touched 13 million downloads in just four months since it was launched in February this year.

Airtel subscribers have shown keen interest in the service and it recorded downloads at the rate of 1.2 download per second. Bharti claims that its App store has the biggest content offering in the country with over 71,000 apps.

Bharti Airtel has entered into a partnership with Britannica to offer free two year subscription to Britannica Online to its broadband customers.

The Encyclopaedia Brittanica online is worth Rs. 6575. Airtel has said that the aim is to offer enhanced services to young users and children. The company said in a statement that its broadband users will join the 100 million Britannica users around the world.

Though, a lot of excitement was expected with the process but just two corporate groups Sahara and Bharti Airtel have submitted the qualifying bids for sponsoring Indian cricket team.

Notably, even the effort of cutting the bidding amount by the BCCI has also not worked for the board as corporate India has once again shown little interest in the sponsorship rights for the cricket team.

While players like Reliance ADAG, Hero Honda, Videocon and Monnet Ispat were earlier expected to be the part of the process but it is now believed that they have opted out of the process.