Bharti Airtel, the second largest telecom operator in India, rocks in the B2B (Business-to-Business) segment. It appears that Airtel has actually been able to use its “premium” branding to convince companies to purchase its services. For the ignorant, Airtel operates its B2B business through a separate brand called Airtel Business. Through Airtel Business, Indian enterprises can purchase various products and services including Airtel IoT, Airtel Conferencing, Airtel Cloud, Airtel Office Internet and more. There are also solutions for global carriers. All these services and products have gained the most trust from the enterprises in the Indian market, making Airtel Business the number one B2B brand in the telecom space in India.
For Q1 FY23, airtel reported revenues for Airtel Business were up 15.2% year-over-year and noted sequential growth of 4.4%. Gopal Vittal, CEO of Bharti Airtel, said Airtel Business is a “jewel” in the company’s portfolio.
“We have outperformed the other publicly traded companies in this area and further accelerated our market share. In fact, Airtel Business has reached a special milestone and is now the #1 B2B player in India,” said Vittal.
Airtel is ahead of Jio and Vodafone Idea in B2B segment
Vittal’s statement suggests that Airtel Jio and Vodafone Idea are leading the way in the corporate space. BSNL (Bharat Sanchar Nigam Limited) also offers business services, but the state-run telco is not really the third choice for businesses to buy services from. One of the most profitable things for Airtel in the B2B segment is the Airtel IoT.
“I also want to mention IoT – where we outperform the market by a margin. You should also know that all our IoT customers are postpaid
customers, but we include these connections as part of the Airtel Business segment. So at the end of the first quarter, we had a customer base of approximately 29.2 million on postpaid – 18.1 million reported in mobile services as part of our mobile services and another 11.1 million IoT connections. In fact, as a segment, postpaid is therefore about 45% larger than our closest competitor,” said Vittal.
This means that Jio and Vodafone Idea still have a lot to catch up with Airtel in the B2B segment. The business segment is sure to become a source of income for Bharti Airtel once it can roll out 5G in large parts of India.
