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On a 1997 visit to Bengaluru, then-UK prime minister John Major hailed BT’s acquisition of a 21 per cent stake in a phone operator owned by Sunil Bharti Mittal as “an indication of the strength of our economy”.
Now Indian politicians are cheering a dramatic reversal after Mittal’s Bharti Enterprises struck a deal to become the British former telecoms monopoly’s largest investor, agreeing to buy a 24.5 per cent, roughly $4bn stake from Franco-Israeli billionaire Patrick Drahi’s indebted Altice.
Bharti Airtel, anchor of the 66-year-old Mittal’s conglomerate, has blossomed since its 1995 founding into one of the world’s biggest network providers and now dwarfs BT.
With 550mn customers across 17 South Asian and African nations, the company commands a $100bn market value — more than five times that of the UK group, which has shed overseas assets in recent years.
Mittal’s purchase was greeted with glee at home, where it has been lauded as symbolic of India’s increasing economic might and part of a trend of national champions acquiring emblematic assets from its former colonial master.
Commerce minister Piyush Goyal reposted on X instructions made a decade ago by Prime Minister Narendra Modi: “I want Indian companies to become multinational.”
A cross-border operator at ease navigating international political corridors, Mittal has been happy to fulfil that command, with an international deal spree well under way even before Modi came to power that included Bharti Airtel’s $10.7bn deal in 2010 to take control of the African network owned by Kuwait’s Zain.
Modi “wants certain businesses to go outside of India and represent”, said one person close to the billionaire. Bharti is “one of those enterprises”.
Mittal hails from the industrial city of Ludhiana in northern India, home to a mass of small-scale businesses that left a lasting mark. His late father was a member of parliament with the Indian National Congress, the party that dominated politics for decades after independence.
“His parents have been quite influential,” said Neil Shah, partner at technology consultancy Counterpoint Research. “They’re very well connected.”
Mittal’s father was keen to establish a large family business, backing his teenage son’s first foray manufacturing bicycle parts. During the socialist strictures of India’s “Licence Raj”, which kept a lid on entrepreneurial ambition, the younger Mittal became adept at finding loopholes in labyrinthine regulations.
He won over indifferent bank managers, even playing table tennis with one to get cheques cleared. But his electric generator business was still quashed by a sudden import ban in the 1980s.
Mittal found his calling replacing old rotary-dial telephones prevalent in India, importing components for push-button phones after coming across them during a trip to Taiwan. As India’s economy was prised open during the reformist 1990s, Mittal bid for a private telecom licence, setting in motion a nationwide technological transformation.
But as his telecoms business flourished, many of his conglomerate’s moves in other areas, such as food and retail, floundered. Bharti’s efforts to bring Walmart to India, a nation where retail remains dominated by small family-owned shops, sparked protests in 2007 in which effigies of the two companies’ executives were burnt. The partnership ended six years later after New Delhi probed the US group for potential violations of foreign ownership rules. Such struggles partly explain why he is sticking to the industry he knows best.
Mittal’s greatest challenger remains Asia’s richest man, Mukesh Ambani, with whom he started skirmishing in the early 2000s.
“Am I scared? No. Am I concerned? Yes,” Mittal said in 2016 as Ambani’s new carrier Jio sparked a price war that whittled down India’s roughly dozen operators.
Bharti Airtel’s size helped it weather that storm, according to Shah, cementing itself as India’s second-largest network and settling into a near duopoly with its arch-rival. One banker whose company has worked with Bharti said Mittal “has to live in the shadow of Jio and Mr Ambani”.
The urbane billionaire’s family background has imbued him with an interest in international politics. He was previously a trustee at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and sits on advisory boards from the US Council for Foreign Relations to Hakluyt, a London-based consultancy founded by former MI6 intelligence officers.
In the UK, where two of his three children are settled, Mittal received an honorary knighthood this year and has pushed for a conclusion to a trade deal being hashed out between London and New Delhi.
But beyond his sentimentality towards the UK — where investments include Scotland’s upmarket Gleneagles resort, The Hoxton hotel chain and satellite company OneWeb — the strategic motivation for the BT deal remains unclear.
Mittal, who has said he does not intend to take control of the company and has not negotiated board seats, has been coy about the ultimate ambitions behind his highest-profile move in Britain. Analysts speculate that he may mount a tie-up with OneWeb, which has stolen a march in India’s satellite internet race.
The billionaire says he is investing in BT for the long haul, backing chief executive Allison Kirkby’s cost-cutting and fibre network spending strategy, while praising the UK’s investment climate.
“There are not too many opportunities like this where you can get a block of shares in an iconic company,” said the person familiar with the tycoon. Bharti’s “base at home” has given Mittal “the necessary strength to make these moves abroad”.
Robert Johnson is a UK-based business writer specializing in finance and entrepreneurship. With an eye for market trends and a keen interest in the corporate world, he offers readers valuable insights into business developments.
