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Bharti Cellular to start Mumbai service from Wed

Bharti Cellular Ltd, a fully owned subsidiary of Bharti Tele-Ventures, will launch mobile phone services in the financial capital of Mumbai on Wednesday, the Bombay Stock Exchange said.

Bharti Tele-Ventures is an integrated telecoms services provider with a presence in the fixed-line, national long distance and the overseas call market.

The company rolled out on Monday cellular phone services in India's most industrialised state of Maharashtra, of which Mumbai is the capital.

India's $5.0-billion mobile phone sector, seen as one of the fastest-growing markets globally in this decade, has some 7.4 million users. This number is expected to surge at a compounded annual rate of 46 per cent in the next five years.

New Delhi-based Bharti, which says it controls a fifth of the mobile market, already has a presence in 13 of the 22 cellular zones into which India's nascent telecoms sector is divided.

"Maharashtra is a heavily industrialised state. It has the potential because mobile penetration levels are low," Sanjay Kapoor, executive director at Bharti Cellular, the company's mobile unit, told Reuters.

"There are about 500,000 (mobile) customers in Maharashtra. We expect that number to double in one year."

Bharti will also launch mobile services in the adjacent state of Gujarat.

Bharti -- in which private equity investor E M Warburg Pincus and Singapore Telecommunications hold stakes -- will compete with unlisted Idea Cellular Ltd, owned jointly by US giant AT&T and India's Tata and Birla groups and BPL Communications Ltd in the Maharashtra circle.

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