Beetel rolls out 20 millionth phone

Bharti Teletech, the manufacturing arm of Bharti Enterprises, rolled out the 20 millionth phone making it the largest manufacturer of telephone instruments globally outside China. 

The celebrations was flagged off by Arun Shourie, Union Minister of Communications, who applauded the Mittals for their courage and endeavor to take up manufacturing and making a success out of it. He urged the country to focus on manufacturing also since service alone without being backed by manufacturing will prove to be 'fickle' in the long run.

"Concurrently India should also look at positioning itself as a global hub for new kinds of services like surgical procedures and higher education," said
Shourie.

The company has three manufacturing bases in the country at Ludhiana, Gurgaon and Goa with a manufacturing capacity of five million instruments per year. The company began its first foray into telephone instruments in 1983 at the Ludhiana plant.

Today, the company proudly claims that one out of every three phones in the country is a Beetel phone. Therefore, logically BSNL and MTNL are its biggest customers followed by private service providers including Tata Teleservices. And this is despite Tata Teleservices being a manufacturer of phone instruments, claimed Rakesh Mittal, Vice-Chairman and MD, Bharti Enterprises.

Said Mittal, "What is remarkable is that while the first 10 million phones took the company 12 years to produce, the second 10 million phones came in just four years." This jump has coincided with the telecom boom that the country has witnessed over the last couple of years with the entry of private basic service operators.

From its humble beginnings, the company today also exports telephone instruments to countries like US, SAARC countries, Africa and the Middle East. In fact, the developing instruments for India, the company has mastered certain features that are unique to the Indian conditions and therefore gives in edge in other tropical countries. For instance, the country has to deal with the problem of making the instruments resistant to the humidity in India which is a technology which other telephone instrument manufacturers did not posses and therefore helped the company win tenders in some African and ME countries.

Cyber News Service

(CNS)