Bhart Airtel Limited Case Study Analysis

The case study “Strategic Outsourcing at Bharti Airtel Limited” discusses the impact of quick growth on Bharti Airtel Limited, and its need to make a large decision regarding outsourcing within its IT department. Bharti Airtel Limited is the largest cellular service provider in India, with more than 141 million subscriptions currently. It also offers fixed line services and broadband services. It is also India’s largest integrated and first private telecom services provider, and a worldwide leader in mobile and fixed wireless services. But Bharti ran into a problem in 2003. Business was becoming so successful and growing so rapidly, that the company couldn’t keep up. The core competency of Bharti Airtel Limited was its “single-minded devotion to the project and the industry.” The company focused completely on telecom, rather than many different services at once like its competitors would attempt. Its operational strategy, to “pursue the acquisition of licenses for mobile operations in other geographic regions, or circles” proved successful as the company dominated the industry, having 91% of the customer base. It also strived to provide value-added services – data transmission, texting, games, ringtones, etc. in order to maintain its competitive advantage over its competition. The company was structure into three strategic business units to allow for a better handle on its operations: mobile services, long-distance/group data/enterprise, and broadband/telephone services. This allowed the company to focus its energy into where it would be most successful. Bharti was certainly doing many things right, which led to so much growth that it was quickly becoming an issue.

According to the case study, the main problem Bharti Airtel Limited was facing was how to manage its capital expenditures for its operations and how to face this exponential growth in a competitive environment: “Budgeting and the tendering process for