Bharti Airtel, the second-largest telecom operator in India is rocking in the B2B (Business-to-Business) segment. It looks like Airtel has actually been able to leverage its “premium” branding into convincing enterprises to purchase its services. For the unaware, Airtel operates its B2B business via a separate brand called Airtel Business. Through Airtel Business, Indian enterprises can purchase several products and services including Airtel IoT, Airtel Conferencing, Airtel Cloud, Airtel Office Internet, and more. There are solutions for global carriers as well. All of these services and products have received the most trust from the enterprises in the Indian market due to which Airtel Business has become the number one B2B brand in the telecom space within India. For Q1 FY23, Airtel reported that revenues for Airtel Business were up 15.2% YoY and 4.4% sequential growth was noticed. Gopal Vittal, CEO of Bharti Airtel said that Airtel Business is a ‘Jewel’ in the portfolio of the company. “We have out-performed the other listed companies in this space and accelerated our market share further. In fact, Airtel Business has reached a special milestone and is now the #1 B2B player in India,” said Vittal.
Airtel Ahead of Jio and Vodafone Idea in B2B Segment
Vittal’s statement suggests that Airtel is ahead of Jio and Vodafone Idea in the enterprise space. BSNL (Bharat Sanchar Nigam Limited) also offers enterprise services, but the state-run telco is not really even the third choice for businesses to purchase services from. One of the most profitable things for Airtel in the B2B segment is the Airtel IoT. “I also want to call out IoT – where we are outperforming the market by a margin. You should also know that all our IoT customers are postpaid customers but we include these connections as a part of the Airtel Business segment. So at the end of Q1, we had a customer base of about 29.2 Million on Postpaid – 18.1 million reported in Mobile services as a part of our Mobile services and another 11.1 million IoT connections. In effect Post-paid, therefore, as a segment is about 45% larger than our nearest competitor,” said Vittal. This means that Jio and Vodafone Idea still have a lot to catch up with Airtel in the B2B segment. The enterprise segment is definitely going to be a revenue driver for Bharti Airtel once it can roll out 5G in wide parts of India.
