Sunil Bharti Mittal is an Indian entrepreneur and the founder and chairman of Bharti Enterprises, the group that owns Bharti Airtel. He started in 1976 with about 20,000 rupees and a bicycle parts workshop in Ludhiana, moved into telephone equipment in the 1980s, and won one of India's first mobile licences in 1995. Airtel now serves more than 650 million subscribers across India, South Asia and Africa, and Mittal has extended the group into satellite communications, data centres, financial services and a stake in BT Group.
Last edited 14 October 20262 revisions15 sourcesReading time 26 min
Timeline
1957Born on 23 October in Ludhiana, Punjab, the son of the politician Sat Paul Mittal.
1976Graduates in arts from Panjab University and starts Bharti Enterprises with about 20,000 rupees, making bicycle crankshafts in Ludhiana.
1980Sets up Bharti Overseas Trading Company to import industrial materials and consumer products.
1981Begins importing and distributing Suzuki portable generators, a business that ends in 1983 when the government restricts generator imports.
1985Founds Bharti Telecom Limited and, through a technical partnership with Siemens, begins making push button telephones under the Beetel brand.
1989Bharti Telecom becomes one of India's largest domestic telephone makers, with capacity for 200,000 units a year.
1992Leads a consortium with SFR, Emtel and MSI to bid for mobile licences in Indian metropolitan circles.
1995Launches GSM mobile services in Delhi under the Airtel brand.
1998Starts international operations with mobile services in the Seychelles.
2000Singtel buys a stake in Bharti for 400 million dollars; the IndiaOne long distance service is launched; the Bharti Foundation is set up.
2002Bharti goes public in India's first 100 per cent book built initial public offering, with about two million mobile subscribers at the time.
2004Signs a network management outsourcing deal with IBM and Ericsson, the model that let the company scale without owning all its infrastructure.
2007The group crosses 50 million customers; Bharti Infratel is formed; he becomes president of the Confederation of Indian Industry and receives the Padma Bhushan.
2008Opens merger talks with South Africa's MTN Group, which end without a deal.
2010Bharti acquires Zain's mobile operations in 15 African countries for 10.7 billion dollars and a 70 per cent stake in Warid Telecom of Bangladesh.
2012Bharti Infratel is listed and raises 760 million dollars.
2013The Walmart retail partnership is dissolved; Bharti Airtel buys Warid Congo and sets up Nxtra Data; a Delhi court summons him over spectrum allocation and the Supreme Court later quashes the summons.
2015Bharti Airtel becomes the third largest mobile operator in the world by subscribers and he becomes a founding investor in OneWeb.
2016Airtel Payments Bank becomes the first payments bank licensed by the Reserve Bank of India; he is elected chairman of the International Chamber of Commerce.
2017He is elected chairman of the GSM Association for a two year term.
2019Airtel Africa lists on the London and Nigerian exchanges and raises 3.6 billion dollars through a rights issue.
2020Leads a consortium with the United Kingdom government that buys OneWeb out of bankruptcy for about a billion dollars, and becomes its executive chairman.
2022Airtel begins its 5G rollout in India and secures a one billion dollar investment from Google.
2023OneWeb merges with Eutelsat with Bharti as the largest shareholder and Mittal as co-chair; Bharti buys AXA's 49 per cent stake in its insurance venture; the group sells four commercial properties to Brookfield in a deal valued at about 5,000 crore rupees.
2024Bharti Hexacom is listed in a 4,275 crore rupee initial public offering; Bharti buys 24.95 per cent of BT Group and he is appointed an honorary Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire.
2025Bharti becomes the second largest shareholder in Sundrop Brands, the listed fast moving consumer goods company.
2026Airtel passes 650 million subscribers, the second largest mobile operator in the world, and he announces he will step down as chairman of Airtel Africa in July 2026.
Early life and family
Sunil Bharti Mittal was born on 23 October 1957 in Ludhiana, Punjab, one of four children of Sat Paul Mittal and Lalita Mittal. His father was a politician who served three terms in the Rajya Sabha between 1976 and 1992, and in 1987 he received the United Nations Peace Medal from Secretary-General Javier Perez de Cuellar for his work on population control and development. The family was comfortable rather than wealthy, and the political connections of the father ran alongside the business career of the son without merging with it.[1]
Mittal has told the story of starting out with borrowed capital in 1976, when he was 18 and had just finished his degree: a workshop making bicycle crankshafts in Ludhiana, funded with about 20,000 rupees of family money. The venture did not make him rich, but it taught him how to import, how to get a licence and how to sell to industrial customers, and the next three businesses followed the same pattern, finding an import that Indian buyers needed and assembling it locally.[1][2]
The direction of his life changed with push button telephones. Landline phones in India in the mid 1980s were supplied by the state, and the instruments were mostly rotary dial models. Mittal imported kits, assembled them in India and sold them under the Mitbrau brand, and then founded Bharti Telecom Limited in 1985 with a technical partnership with Siemens to make electronic push button phones under the Beetel name. By 1989 the company was one of the largest domestic telephone manufacturers in the country.[1]
Education
Mittal went to school in Punjab, including a period at the Wynberg Allen School in Mussoorie, and graduated with a bachelor of arts from Panjab University in 1976. He did not take a management degree, and his business education came from the workshops, import licences and manufacturing units he ran through his twenties. The gaps show in the way he talks about his companies: in inputs, distribution and customers rather than in strategy frameworks.[1]
The lack of a formal business qualification has not stopped the recognition that usually follows one. He holds honorary doctorates from the Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur, the University of Leeds, Newcastle University and the ESCP Business School in Paris, and was made a fellow of the Indian National Academy of Engineering in 2023. Indian industry treats those honours as a substitute for the degree he never took, and Mittal has used his platform at those institutions to argue for vocational and technical training rather than only for academic education.[1]
The other part of his education was the Punjab of the 1970s, where a family with political connections and no industrial capital could still start a factory. Mittal has often described his early businesses as typical of that period: import substitution in a protected market, where the advantage came from knowing which licence to apply for and which foreign partner to sign with. Push button telephones were the last of those businesses and the first that led to something much larger.[2]
Business career and companies
The decision that made Bharti a telecom company rather than a telephone manufacturer came in 1992. India had opened mobile services to private operators in the metros, and Mittal formed a consortium with the French company SFR, Emtel of Mauritius and the technology partner MSI to bid for a licence. The consortium won Delhi, and in 1995 Bharti launched GSM services under the Airtel brand. It was among the first private mobile networks in the country and it put a manufacturer of plastic telephones into the business of running a network.[1]
The next phase was financing and scale. Singtel of Singapore bought a 400 million dollar stake in Bharti in 2000, which gave the company both capital and a partner that had built mobile networks in a small, dense market. Bharti went public in 2002 in India's first 100 per cent book built offering, and the company expanded into long distance, enterprise data services and, later, the retail market. The expansion was paid for by a mixture of equity, debt and the growing cash flow of the mobile business.[1]
The company's most copied decision was to outsource. In 2004 Bharti signed agreements with IBM and Ericsson under which the vendors ran the information technology and the network, leaving Bharti to sell airtime and manage customers. The model was unusual at the time and it let a relatively small company scale to a national footprint without building every capability itself: by 2005 Airtel was operational in all 23 telecom circles of India.[1][4]
The group widened in 2007 with a retail joint venture with Walmart, an insurance venture with AXA, and the formation of Bharti Infratel to hold its tower infrastructure. The Walmart partnership was dissolved in 2013 after regulatory difficulties with foreign investment in retail, and the insurance venture eventually became wholly owned by Bharti after it bought AXA's stake in 2023. Bharti Infratel was listed in 2012 and later merged with Indus Towers, creating one of the largest tower companies in the world.[1]
International expansion came in the 2010s. In 2010 Bharti bought the African mobile operations of Kuwait's Zain in 15 countries for 10.7 billion dollars, the largest overseas acquisition by an Indian company at the time, and acquired a 70 per cent stake in Warid Telecom of Bangladesh. The African business was later listed as Airtel Africa on the London and Nigerian exchanges in 2019, and the group's international arm now operates across India, South Asia and Africa.[1][3]
Bharti Airtel
Bharti Airtel is the company Mittal built and the source of most of the group's revenue and reputation. It sells mobile voice and data, broadband, direct to home television, enterprise connectivity and payments through Airtel Payments Bank, and it operates in 17 countries across India, South Asia and Africa. By 2026 it had more than 650 million subscribers, making it the second largest mobile operator in the world by subscriber base.[1][5]
The company's history is a sequence of shocks absorbed and prices cut. It grew through the years when Indian mobile tariffs fell faster than anywhere else in the world, went through the 2016 entry of Reliance Jio that pushed data prices to among the lowest globally, and survived a period in which the smaller operators merged or closed. Airtel's response was to raise capital, sell parts of its tower and payments businesses to outside investors and hold its margins, a course that left it as one of only three private national operators.[4][5]
The market's verdict arrived in 2024, when Bharti Airtel became the first Indian company of its generation to reach a market capitalisation of 100 billion dollars. The share price then rose further on the back of tariff increases, the 5G rollout and the growth of the African business. That valuation is the financial expression of Mittal's career: a bicycle parts workshop, then a telephone assembly line, then one of the largest mobile networks on the planet.[1]
Airtel's 5G rollout began in 2022 and was unusual for its speed, covering most of urban India within about a year, and the company has been an early adopter of fixed wireless broadband as a way of selling high speed internet without laying cable to every home. The network investment is enormous and it is the reason the company's balance sheet carries heavy debt, which in turn is why the tariff increases of the 2020s matter more to its results than any new service.[1][5]
Bharti Enterprises and the wider group
Bharti Enterprises is the holding company through which the family owns its businesses, and it has been diversified deliberately beyond telecom. Its interests now include satellite communications through the stake in Eutelsat and OneWeb, data centres under Nxtra, real estate, financial services including insurance and payments, and a stake in the listed fast moving consumer goods company Sundrop Brands. There is also the manufacturing side, which traces back to the telephone assembly business and now includes telecom equipment and defence related production.[1]
The group's real estate arm has been built through partnerships rather than alone. In 2023 Brookfield and Bharti closed a deal valued at about 5,000 crore rupees for four commercial properties, including the Worldmark assets in Delhi Aerocity and Gurugram, which put a large part of the group's office portfolio into a joint venture with an institutional investor. Mittal has consistently preferred to hold operating businesses with partners who bring capital and keep the management in house.[1]
The most consequential structural decision of the last decade was the creation of separate listed vehicles for parts of the group. Bharti Infratel, Airtel Africa and Bharti Hexacom were all listed on the exchanges, which raised money and gave the group a market valuation for each business. Hexacom's listing in 2024 raised about 4,275 crore rupees and was one of the larger offerings of that year. Releasing value from the infrastructure and the regional businesses has become the group's standard way of funding the next investment.[1]
Mittal's own role has shifted with the structure. He remains the chairman of Bharti Enterprises and Bharti Airtel, but he has handed operating responsibility for parts of the group to a management team and to his children, and in March 2026 he announced that he would step down as chairman of Airtel Africa in July of that year. The change is the clearest signal yet that the group is preparing for a transition in which the founder's authority is replaced by boards and executives.[1][5]
OneWeb, Eutelsat and satellite communications
The group's satellite business began as a financial investment and became a second telecom platform. Bharti became a founding investor in OneWeb in 2015, taking a strategic minority stake in a consortium that planned to put hundreds of small satellites in low earth orbit to deliver internet from space. When OneWeb filed for bankruptcy in 2020, Mittal led a consortium with the United Kingdom government that bought the company for about a billion dollars, and he became its executive chairman.[1]
Under that ownership OneWeb completed its constellation, using launches on Russian Soyuz rockets and, after the war in Ukraine ended that arrangement, rockets from the Indian Space Research Organisation. In 2023 OneWeb merged with the French satellite operator Eutelsat, with Bharti emerging as the largest shareholder and Mittal as co-chairman. The merged company is one of the three global low earth orbit systems alongside SpaceX's Starlink and Amazon's Kuiper.[1]
The strategic logic is that satellites cover the places where terrestrial networks cannot go: the sea, the desert, the mountains and the remote districts where laying fibre costs more than the revenue it would earn. Bharti's Indian distribution network and its licences give OneWeb an advantage in India that pure satellite companies lack, and the group has argued that satellite and mobile are complements rather than competitors. Whether the business eventually makes money is a separate question, and the losses of the low earth orbit operators are an open issue for their investors.[1]
BT Group and the international stakes
In 2024 Bharti Televentures UK acquired 24.95 per cent of BT Group, the British telecommunications company, and Mittal joined its board. The purchase was funded by Bharti Global and it made the Indian group the largest single shareholder in what was once the world's largest telecom company. Mittal described it as a long term financial investment in a business with valuable infrastructure, a large pension liability and a management that was trying to cut costs.[6]
The purchase is the most visible sign of how far Bharti's international position has moved. An Indian company that began by importing telephone kits now owns a quarter of the former British state monopoly, and Mittal has been described in the British press as a patient investor rather than an activist, with a stated preference for letting the management run the company. The stake also gives Bharti exposure to a market where consolidation, fibre deployment and the retirement of the copper network are the main themes.[6]
The group's other international holdings follow the same pattern of stakes rather than takeovers. It holds positions in African mobile operations through Airtel Africa, in satellite through Eutelsat, in tower infrastructure through the merged Indus Towers and in the consumer goods company Sundrop Brands. For a founder who spent the first two decades of his career in India, the last decade has been about owning pieces of businesses that give Bharti a position in markets it does not run.[1][6]
Net worth and wealth
Mittal's wealth is the family's stake in Bharti Enterprises, which in turn holds the controlling interest in Bharti Airtel and shares of the group's other listed and unlisted companies. Forbes has listed Sunil Mittal and family among India's wealthiest people through the 2020s, and the figure that the listing follows is essentially the market value of the group's holdings less the debt that the group's companies carry. There is no separate investment portfolio of the kind that some industrialists build; the fortune rises and falls with one group of companies.[7]
The dates that matter for the number are the listings. Bharti Infratel's 2012 flotation raised 760 million dollars and gave the group a market value for its towers. Airtel Africa's dual listing in London and Lagos in 2019 raised 3.6 billion dollars in a rights issue and made the African business a separately valued company. Bharti Hexacom's offering in 2024 raised about 4,275 crore rupees. Each of those events converted a part of the group's value into a price the market could see.[1]
The other number attached to the family is philanthropic rather than personal. In 2017 the Bharti family pledged about 7,000 crore rupees to philanthropy, one of the larger commitments made by an Indian business family, to be delivered through the Bharti Airtel Foundation and its education programmes. The pledge is a share of the family's stake rather than cash set aside, which is how Indian industrial philanthropy is usually structured: the giving is funded from the ownership of the business rather than from an endowment built separately.[15]
What the wealth has bought in visible terms is modest by the standards of Indian industry. Mittal lives in New Delhi, works from the group's offices, and the family's public profile is largely the profile of the companies: the Airtel brand on billboards and the foundation's schools in villages. He is often described in Indian business writing as the least glamorous of the country's telecom billionaires, an assessment that is meant as a compliment to his focus rather than a comment on his spending.[7][2]
Wife and children
Sunil Mittal is married to Nyna Mittal, who works in education and philanthropy and is associated with the family's foundation and its schools. They have three children: a daughter, Eiesha Bharti Pasricha, and twin sons, Kavin Bharti Mittal and Shravin Bharti Mittal. Eiesha is involved in the group's hospitality and investment interests, and the two sons have each built their own businesses before joining the family's holding company.[1]
Kavin Mittal founded the messaging and services app Hike, which raised money from Tencent and Foxconn and at its peak was valued at more than a billion dollars, before he moved into the group's satellite and technology businesses. Shravin Mittal founded the investment firm Unbound and became a director of Bharti Global, where he worked on the OneWeb acquisition and on the purchase of the BT Group stake. Both sons are now involved in the family holding company, and their careers were built outside it before they were brought in.[1]
The children's own events have been covered as business news. Shravin Mittal's wedding to Sakshi Chhabra, his schoolfriend, was reported by the business press in 2015 because of the industrial families involved, and the coverage described the marriages of the second generation as a measure of how the group's relationships with other Indian business houses are consolidating. Indian business writing treats family events as part of the corporate record, which is why they appear in profiles of the founder.[9]
Mittal's brother, Rajan Bharti Mittal, has also been a senior figure in the group, running its retail and other businesses, and interviews with him are part of the family's public story. The Mittals, unlike some Indian business families, have kept their internal divisions out of the courts and out of the press, and the group's ownership has stayed under one set of control while the next generation has been brought in through operating roles.[10]
Family and the next generation
The succession at Bharti has been managed more openly than at most Indian groups. Mittal has said that his children have to earn their positions rather than inherit them, and the group's structure gives each of them a part of the business to run with a board above them. The Business Today account of the handover describes a deliberate arrangement in which the founder keeps the chairman's role while the operating companies are run by professional managers and by the next generation in defined areas.[8]
That arrangement is easier to run in a group that has been split into listed companies, because each business has its own board, its own accounts and its own investors. Airtel, Airtel Africa, Bharti Hexacom and the tower business are all separately audited companies, and a fourth generation successor with a board seat is a smaller risk to them than a successor with total control of an unlisted family firm would be. Indian family businesses have been moving towards that model for a decade, and Bharti is one of the groups that has gone furthest.[8]
The founder's own position remains central. He signed the deals that created the group, he took the risk on the African purchase, he bought OneWeb out of bankruptcy and he took the stake in BT, and the strategic decisions that the group's boards approve are still described in the press as his. The test of the arrangement will come when those decisions have to be made without him, and Mittal's decision to step back from the chairmanship of Airtel Africa in 2026 is the first formal step in that direction.[8][5]
Personal life
Mittal is known for a public style that is closer to a promoter than to a manager: he speaks at industry events, gives interviews about policy and appears in campaigns for his own brand. The photograph that the government of India released of him at the Ram Janmabhoomi ceremony in Ayodhya in January 2024, which is the picture used on this page, is a fair example of where he appears in public life, at national events alongside the country's political leadership.[1]
His interviews return repeatedly to two themes: that he began with nothing and that the state's decisions about licences and spectrum have shaped his business more than any private competitor. He has talked about the years when the group's future depended on a winning bid and about the anxiety of funding a national network before the customers arrived. The tone is less philosophical than that of some of his contemporaries; the accounts are about cash, licences and timing.[2][11]
He is also one of the Indian businessmen who has engaged publicly with the question of India's relationship with global institutions. As chairman of the International Chamber of Commerce and of the GSM Association, and as a member of the World Economic Forum's International Business Council, he has argued that Indian companies should be represented in the bodies that write the rules for global trade and technology. His opponents would say that this is the standard position of a company that benefits from access, and his supporters that a market of Airtel's size needs a voice in those rooms.[1]
House and property
Mittal's home is in New Delhi, where the group's headquarters, Bharti Crescent on Nelson Mandela Marg, has been the address on the company's filings since the 1990s. Unlike several of his contemporaries, he has not been associated with a single celebrated private residence, and the family's property is largely the group's rather than the household's: office buildings, data centres, the exchange buildings that carry the Airtel brand and the infrastructure of the network itself.[1]
The group's commercial property has become a business in its own right. Bharti's real estate arm holds office parks and commercial buildings, and in 2023 Brookfield and Bharti closed a deal valued at about 5,000 crore rupees for four commercial properties, including the Worldmark assets in Delhi Aerocity and Gurugram. The transaction put a large part of the group's office portfolio into a joint venture, which is the model Mittal has preferred for assets that produce rent rather than subscribers.[1]
The foundation's schools are the family's other built presence, with the Satya Bharti schools constructed in villages where the group's network reaches and the foundation's programmes run. Mittal has described the school building programme as the most visible thing his money has produced, which is a fair summary of how the family's property record reads: offices, data centres and school buildings rather than palaces.[2][1]
Awards and recognition
Padma Bhushan, awarded by the Government of India in 2007 for services in trade and industry.[1]
Honorary Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire, appointed in 2024 by King Charles III, making him the first Indian citizen to receive the honour from the King.[1]
GSM Association Chairman's Award, given by the global mobile industry body whose chairmanship he held in 2017 and 2018.[12]
Lal Bahadur Shastri National Award for excellence in public administration, academics and management.[1]
Global Economy Prize, awarded by the Kiel Institute in Germany for contributions to the world economy.[1]
Honorary doctorates from the Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur, the University of Leeds, Newcastle University and the ESCP Business School in Paris, and a fellowship of the Indian National Academy of Engineering in 2023.[1]
Business Icon of the Year, awarded by Business Today in 2024 for his role in transforming Indian telecom.[2]
Industry bodies and board seats
President of the Confederation of Indian Industry for 2007 and 2008, the country's largest industry association.[13]
Chairman of the International Chamber of Commerce from 2016 to 2018 and honorary chairman after that.[14]
Chairman of the GSM Association, the global body of mobile operators, from 2017 to 2018.[1]
Co-chairman of Eutelsat and director of BT Group, following the group's investments in both companies.[1][6]
Member of the World Economic Forum's International Business Council and chair of its telecommunications steering committee, and a former trustee of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.[1]
Chair of the B20 India Action Council on African Economic Integration during India's G20 presidency in 2023.[1]
Member of the board of the Qatar Foundation Endowment, and former director of Unilever, Standard Chartered and SoftBank Corp.[1]
Founding chairman of the Cellular Operators Association of India, the domestic industry body he helped create.[1]
Philanthropy and the Bharti Airtel Foundation
Mittal set up the Bharti Foundation in 2000, which now operates as the Bharti Airtel Foundation. Its main programme, the Satya Bharti School Program, runs about 155 rural schools, and its Quality Support Program works with roughly 1,100 government schools to improve teaching. In 2024 the foundation launched TheTeacherApp, a free platform for teacher training, and a scholarship programme for students from less advantaged backgrounds studying technology focused engineering courses at nationally ranked colleges.[1]
In 2017 the family pledged about 7,000 crore rupees to philanthropy, a commitment reported as one of the largest by an Indian business family and intended to fund the foundation's education work over the long term. The pledge is the reason the foundation's programmes have been able to plan beyond annual budgets, and it moved the Mittals into the group of Indian families whose giving is large enough to be counted nationally rather than described as corporate social responsibility.[15]
The foundation also funds higher education institutions and partnerships, including work with the Indian Institutes of Technology in Delhi and Mumbai, the Indian School of Business, Plaksha University, Anant University, Chanakya University and the University of Cambridge. The pattern is the same as at other large Indian groups: the money goes into institutions that train people rather than into one-off relief, and the founder's name is attached to buildings and programmes rather than to a separate charitable brand.[1]
Controversies and criticism
The 2G spectrum allocation scandal of the late 2000s led to a summons for Mittal. In 2013 he was asked to appear before a Delhi court in connection with an investigation into the allocation of spectrum, and the summons was subsequently quashed by the Supreme Court. The case reached several Indian industrialists and the group's name appeared in the proceedings, and it remains the most serious legal matter attached to his career, even though it ended without a finding against him.[1]
Airtel has been criticised for its role in the price war that reshaped Indian telecom. The company, like its competitors, has been accused of predatory pricing at several points, of tariff increases that came immediately after the market consolidated to three private operators, and of quality of service that falls short of what consumers pay for. Regulators have fined the operators repeatedly for call drop and interconnection failures, and the group has argued that the fines were for problems created by a shortage of spectrum it had asked the government to release.[1]
The company's tax disputes are the other recurring theme. Airtel has been involved in long running litigation over licence fees and adjusted gross revenue with the government's department of telecommunications, one of the cases that produced the industry-wide ruling which left the operators, including Vodafone Idea, owing large sums. The dispute has cost the industry tens of thousands of crores and is often cited as an example of regulatory uncertainty in Indian telecom.[1]
The Walmart retail joint venture ended in 2013 after the government's rules on foreign investment in multi brand retail made the arrangement unworkable, and the episode is usually described as a case of a business caught by a change in policy rather than by any wrongdoing. Mittal's broader criticism is the one that attaches to the industry as a whole: that a market which began with dozens of licensed operators in 1995 was reduced to three private companies and a state operator in about twenty five years, and that the concentration was produced as much by the cost of spectrum and regulation as by competition.[1]
Reading the numbers
The shape of Mittal's career is a series of bets on scarcity. In the 1980s the scarcity was push button telephones, in the 1990s it was a mobile licence in a market with almost no mobile phones, in the 2000s it was spectrum and towers, and in the 2010s it was the African market and then satellites. In each case he bought the scarce asset early, financed it heavily, and then sold capacity that was abundant once the network was built. That is the opposite of a business built on a product; it is a business built on access.[1][4]
The vulnerability is that access is granted by governments. Indian telecom's history is a history of policy decisions, spectrum auctions, licence fee rulings and the entry of new competitors, and Bharti's results have moved with all of them. The company's own explanation is that it has always been a regulated utility with a consumer brand, and the group's diversification into satellite, data centres, payments and insurance is partly an attempt to earn money in places where a licence does not decide the outcome.[1][5]
The scale of what was built is still worth stating plainly. A workshop making bicycle crankshafts in Ludhiana in 1976 became, fifty years later, a group whose mobile network serves more than 650 million people across two continents, which owns a quarter of BT Group and the largest share of a European satellite operator, and whose foundation runs 155 schools. It is a rare case of an Indian company that started with no industrial family behind it and ended as one of the largest in the world, and it is the reason Mittal's story is told in Indian business schools as a founder's story rather than as an inheritor's.[1][5][8]
