Sunil Mittalਸੁਨੀਲ ਮਿੱਤਲ

Sunil Mittal is an Indian businessman from Ludhiana who founded Bharti Enterprises and built Bharti Airtel into one of the world's largest mobile phone companies. Starting in 1976 with a small bicycle parts business funded with 20,000 rupees, he went on to reshape how India makes phone calls, and Airtel now serves hundreds of millions of customers across India and Africa.

A Ludhiana start

Sunil Bharti Mittal was born on 23 October 1957 in Ludhiana, Punjab. His father, Sat Pal Mittal, was a politician who served three terms in the Rajya Sabha, the upper house of India's parliament. Sunil was educated at Wynberg Allen School in Mussoorie and took his bachelor's degree from Panjab University in 1976. Rather than follow his father into politics, he chose business, and Ludhiana's world of small factories and cycle workshops became his training ground.

From crankshafts to Beetel phones

In 1976, with seed money of about 20,000 rupees, the 18 year old Mittal started Bharti in Ludhiana, making crankshafts for bicycle makers. The business grew into other small manufacturing, and in the 1980s he spotted a bigger opening: telephones. India's state monopoly made basic phones in limited numbers, and Mittal began importing electronic components and, through Bharti Telecom, set up a partnership with Germany's Siemens to make push-button phones in India under the Beetel name. Beetel phones became a fixture in Indian homes and offices, and Mittal learned the telecom business from the hardware side just as India began opening its economy. Push-button phones were still a novelty in much of India at the time, and Beetel became one of the first Indian brands to build them at scale, selling through dealers across the country and teaching its founder how distribution, branding and after-sales service worked in a vast, price-sensitive market.

Building Airtel

When India auctioned mobile licences in the 1990s, Bharti won the Delhi circle and launched GSM services in 1995 under the Airtel name. Mobile calls in India were then a luxury priced by the minute, and Airtel's bet was the opposite: cut prices, add customers by the million, and make money on volume. The company listed on the stock market in 2002. In 2004 Mittal made the move the industry still studies: Airtel outsourced its network operations to Ericsson and its computer systems to IBM, keeping only core functions in-house, so the company could grow without buying every tower and server itself. Rivals around the world later copied the model.

Expansion followed at speed. In 2010 Bharti bought the African operations of Kuwait's Zain group for about 10.7 billion US dollars, taking Airtel into 15 African countries in one of the largest overseas deals by an Indian company. Airtel grew into the world's second-largest mobile operator by number of subscribers, and Bharti spread into insurance, retail, real estate and satellite communications alongside telecom.

What made Airtel's business model different?

Most phone companies owned everything: the towers, the network teams, the billing computers. Mittal's Airtel paid partners per unit of capacity instead, turning heavy fixed costs into costs that grew only with customers. Combined with some of the world's lowest call tariffs, the model let Airtel add millions of subscribers a month at its peak while still making a profit, and business schools now teach it as a case study in how to serve low-income markets at scale.

OneWeb, BT and global honours

In 2020 Bharti led the rescue of the satellite company OneWeb alongside the British government, and in 2023 OneWeb merged with France's Eutelsat, with Mittal as co-chair of the combined group. In 2024 Bharti took a stake of about 24.95 percent in BT Group, Britain's largest telecom company. Mittal has chaired the global industry bodies too: he led the International Chamber of Commerce from 2016 to 2018 and the GSMA, the mobile industry association, from 2017 to 2018. India awarded him the Padma Bhushan in 2007. In 2024 King Charles III conferred an honorary knighthood on him, the KBE, for services to UK-India business relations; the insignia was presented in New Delhi on 22 February 2025, and he is described by the British government as the first Indian citizen to receive the honour from King Charles III. Through the Bharti Foundation, set up in 2000, his Satya Bharti schools educate children in villages across India.

From a crankshaft workshop in Ludhiana to boardrooms in London and Paris, Mittal's career tracks the rise of India's private telecom industry itself, and he remains its most recognisable Punjabi face.