"Having diversified into new businesses in agriculture, financial services and retail with strong partners, we have laid the foundation of building a conglomerate of future which will achieve $10 billion revenue by 2010," Mittal said in a long interaction with the reporters. The group's current revenue stands at over Rs 30,000 crore (about six billion dollars).
In fact, Mittal said had the rupee not depreciated as much the company could have grown close to that figure this year itself. Not just the revenue, Mittal is hopeful of making Bharti one of the model group by 2020.
"As Bharti enters its next phase of growth, we have a new vision to make Bharti India's finest conglomerate by 2020", he said after unveiling the company's new logo, the third one since its inception in 1995.
Stating that the group is trying hard to reduce its revenue dependence on the telecom business and do well in insurance and retail, Mittal said both the businesses eventually would contribute over half of the revenue. But for the time being the focus is Airtel.
Bharti Airtel-- India's top mobile operator and the flagship of the group-- is trying hard to expand operations by acquiring foreign telecom companies but is yet to find any immediate targets.
Mittal said: "We have plans for overseas acquisitions but there is no immediate target.... We are ready. We have little loan." He added that valuations of telecom firms had eased around the globe.
Earlier this year, Bharti held talks with South Africa's MTN about a possible combination to create a global top 10 telecom firm, but no deal was reached due to differences over the cross-holdings.
"But things can move fast...in case of MTN things moved very fast", he said, while trying to be optimistic about a good buy-out.
The group is expecting its other businesses -- retail and insurance-- to do equally well as the telecom venture. At present non-telecom business fetch about 20 per cent, while telecom revenue is 80 per cent of the total.
"We want the ratio to be 50:50 from telecom and non-telecom revenues," Mittal said. While repeating his demand for cut in levies for more affordability, he said the Indian market is not for so many players and consolidation must and should happen.
"The Indian market is volume driven and even that is also going to slow over the next 3-4 years. It is not a market for so many players. So there has to be consolidation", he added.
The chairman said the company is hopeful of starting operations in Sri Lanka this year and all the problems with the local operators regarding interconnection is being sorted out. Bharti Airtel has made presentation to Lanka government on the interconnection issue.
Bharti Airtel, one of the earliest entrants in India's mobile services sector, had 77.5 million mobile users at end-September, 20 million more than its closest rival Reliance Communications.
