Sunil Bharti Mittal

Before he bid for India's first Delhi mobile license, Mittal vowed to give up meat, and did not eat it again until Airtel was running. He had no telecom credentials to bid with, so he flew to Paris, signed Vivendi as a partner in a three-hour meeting, and when Vivendi tried to walk days before the deadline, talked its chief executive back into the deal by phone.¹

Sunil Bharti Mittal is the founder and chairman of Bharti Airtel, one of the world's largest telecom operators, providing mobile, broadband, and digital services across India, South Asia, and Africa. He built the company from scratch beginning in the mid-1990s, having entered telecommunications with no formal engineering or telecom training after two earlier businesses were destroyed by government policy.

Background

Mittal was born on October 23, 1957, in Ludhiana, Punjab, India, an industrial city then known as the bicycle capital of Asia. He has said he considers 23 a personally lucky number. His father, Sat Pal Mittal, was a two-term Member of Parliament from Punjab with the Indian National Congress. Mittal has said he wanted to prove that a son of a politician could be a successful businessman, and the political-corridor life his father led held no pull for him.

He is reported to have attended Panjab University in Chandigarh, earning a commerce degree. He had no formal telecom or engineering credentials, and his path was built entirely through a succession of small businesses rather than credentialed expertise.

Getting started

In 1976, at age 18, Mittal borrowed 20,000 rupees from his father and began making bicycle crankshafts for manufacturers such as Hero Cycles, later adding yarn and stainless-steel manufacturing.¹ He traveled with consignments by truck and stayed in budget hotels. In 1980 he sold those businesses, moved to Mumbai, and started an import-trading firm, Bharti Overseas Trading Company, with his brothers, dealing in steel, brass, plastics, and zip fasteners.

Two pivots defined this period. At a Delhi food market he encountered a Suzuki salesman who could not sell portable generators, built for Japanese ice-cream vans, in a country starved for backup power by blackouts. Mittal became India's first Suzuki portable-generator dealer and built national distribution across four cities. In 1983 the government awarded domestic generator-manufacturing licenses to Birla-Yamaha and Shriram-Honda, wiping out his import business overnight. He was also passed over for a Maruti 800 car dealership because those allocations went to the politically connected.

The second pivot came from a 1982 Taiwan trade show, where he saw a push-button phone for the first time while India still ran on rotary dials. He signed a Taiwanese supply contract within days, imported components, and assembled handsets in Ludhiana under the German-sounding brand Mitbrau. He later formalized this into Bharti Telecom with a Siemens tie-up under the brand Beetel, displacing India's rotary phones.

In 1992, India auctioned its first four private mobile licenses, one per metro. Unlike the larger Tata, Birla, and Ambani houses that hesitated, Mittal moved immediately, saying he understood the business and that this was his moment. Lacking operating credentials, he flew to Paris and secured Vivendi as a partner in a three-hour meeting. When Vivendi tried to back out days before the March 31 deadline in favor of a rival bidder, Mittal talked the CEO back into the deal by phone. Bharti won the Delhi cellular license over Tata and Birla. He also persuaded Ericsson to supply network equipment on credit, to be paid, in his framing, when the customers were happy.¹

What he built

Bharti Cellular, operating as Airtel, launched postpaid mobile service in Delhi in November 1995, with the first call placed on September 27, 1995. Through the 2000s and 2010s, Airtel grew into India's leading private mobile operator and expanded internationally into Sri Lanka in 2008 and Bangladesh. In 2010, Bharti acquired Zain's African mobile assets for roughly 10.7 billion dollars across about 15 African countries, making Airtel a pan-African operator overnight in what was its single largest strategic bet.¹ Airtel Africa listed separately on the London Stock Exchange in 2019.

By the mid-2020s, Bharti Airtel ranked among the world's largest carriers by subscriber base, with several hundred million subscribers across India and Africa combined. In 2024, Bharti Enterprises acquired a roughly 24.5 percent stake in the UK's BT Group. After OneWeb's 2020 bankruptcy, Bharti Global became the lead investor alongside the UK government, and Mittal chaired the venture; OneWeb merged with Eutelsat in 2023. His brothers Rakesh and Rajan Bharti Mittal hold senior roles in Bharti Enterprises, and his son Kavin founded the messaging app Hike.

How he operates

Mittal describes a preference for speed over perfection, saying that when caught between the two, one should always choose speed and perfection will follow; Airtel launched before its network buildout was complete.¹ He also emphasizes partnering with entities far larger than his own, citing Suzuki, AT&T, Siemens, and Lucky Goldstar, and every major pivot paired Bharti's small scale with a large partner's credibility, technology, or balance sheet. Rather than fight government-controlled chokepoints such as generator licensing and dealership allocation, he moved into adjacent, not-yet-regulated spaces ahead of incumbents. As a transaction-architect, he built Airtel through a sequence of licensing deals, joint ventures, and outsourcing arrangements, including leasing towers and outsourcing network operations to Ericsson and IT to IBM, that competitors did not treat as available moves.²

Where things stand

Mittal remains chairman of Bharti Enterprises and Bharti Airtel, with operational leadership delegated to Gopal Vittal, who has served as CEO and managing director in recent years, while he stays the controlling promoter-family figure. He is active in satellite communications through Eutelsat OneWeb. Bharti Airtel continues as India's second-largest mobile operator behind Reliance Jio, sometimes leading on revenue and profitability metrics, with a large and growing Africa business. He received the Padma Bhushan in 2007.

Key facts

• Started his first business at 18 with a 20,000-rupee loan from his father, making bicycle crankshafts.
• Had two businesses, a generator import operation and a prospective Maruti dealership, ended by Indian government licensing and allocation decisions in the same period.
• Discovered cellular telecom only after his phone-import and generator businesses had already been wiped out by policy shifts.
• Won India's first Delhi cellular license by personally talking Vivendi's CEO back into a deal days before the bid deadline.
• Convinced Ericsson to supply network equipment on credit before Airtel had a single paying customer.
• Acquired Zain's African assets in 2010, spanning about 15 countries, in one of the largest emerging-market telecom deals of its era.