"The brains behind the $750 million deal with IBM is Akhil Gupta," says Sunil Mittal, chairman and managing director, Bharti group, of his trusted right-hand man.
Insiders say that if Mittal had a third brother it would have been Gupta, who has risen from the ranks over the past 10 years to become the joint managing director of the Bharti group.
Gupta's financial wizardry is legend in the industry. He was instrumental in raising over $1 billion in equity over the past two years -- one of the highest foreign direct investments across the industry in India; he raised $500 million in project finance; and he was the key negotiator in striking a $450 million outsourcing deal with Ericsson for network management.
With over 20 years of experience in the electronics and telecom industry, Gupta has played a big role in Bharti's evolution into the country's largest GSM cellular operator from a company that manufactured gelatin capsules and cycle parts.
In fact Gupta, Mittal and Badri Agarwal, president of Bharti's non-mobile operations, are known as the three musketeers of the Bharti group. Gupta has been associated with almost all the key joint venture deals for Bharti, including those with STET in Italy, German technology giant Siemens and Singapore Telecom.
The 49-year-old chartered accountant has been the strategist behind Mittal's successful buy-outs of five mobile circles in the past few years to take Bharti's cellular tally to 16 circles.
Recently, the company bought out Shyam Telecom's 67 per cent stake in Hexacom for Rs 450 crore (Rs 4.50 billion) and once again Gupta was associated with closing the deal for Bharti.
Company insiders say that Gupta is an unconventional, but extremely sharp, decision-maker. A case in point would be Bharti's initial public offering in 2002, made at a time when market sentiments were down. Even while sceptics questioned the decision, Gupta raised $175 million through the IPO. And during the bidding for the fourth cellular operators' berth, Gupta won licences for eight cellular circles out of the 14 on the block, despite fierce competition from the likes of Hutchison and Reliance.
Naturally then, Gupta has been the target of Bharti's competitors. In fact, when he went for a nine-week management programme to Harvard in 2002, the industry was rife with stories of how the Mittal-Gupta team was on the verge of a break-up and the trip to Boston was an excuse to ease him out of the company. The rumour got stronger with stories of how Gupta was planning a coup on Mittal to take over the company.
But that was two years ago. The pace at which Gupta has moved since then to take Mittal and Bharti to newer heights has shut the rumour mills.
