Airtel ropes in Shahrukh Khan for ads in Sri Lanka

T V SRIRAM

Colombo, Jan 11 (PTI) Ending its long wait, Indian telecom giant Airtel is commencing its Sri Lankan operations Monday after days of aggressive marketing featuring advertisements of bollywood superstar Shahrukh Khan.

TV channels or the newspapers, Airtel communication
managers have spared no efforts in announcing the arrival of
India's telecom giant into the Island country with Khan
appearing in all the commercials.

With mobile penetration in Sri Lanka estimated at around
30 percent and growing at a rate of approximately 2 million
mobile users per annum, Bharti Airtel is looking at cornering
a high market share in the next few years, according to
experts here.

It will, however have to compete with the Telekom
Malaysia-owned Dialog Telecom (the largest operator in Sri
Lanka), Celltel Lanka (owned by Luxembourg-based service
provider Millicom International Cellular), Hutchison (owned by
Hong Kong-based Hutchison Telecommunications) and Sri Lankan
government-owned Mobitel.

"We welcome competition, because it helps all players to
be on their toes. There will be synergies which they bring in
very similar to ours and Bharti Airtel will also have
expertise and synergies which it will bring to the market. It
is going to be a very competitive industry", an Airtel
official stated.

Sri Lanka now has 2.7 million fixed access subscribers,
7.9 million mobile and 200,000 internet and email subscribers.

Airtel, will simultaneously roll out 2G and 3G (third
generation) services in Sri Lanka.

Airtel is expected to invest about 200 million dollars in
setting up and expanding its operation in Sri Lanka over the
next five years.

Ahead of its entry, other operators have slashed tariff
rates and are offering discounts with cellular connections.

Dialog is offering gifts for points collected by its
customers for using the network.

The company had bagged the license for Sri Lanka in early
2007 for 2G and 3G mobile services in Sri Lanka and has hired
Amali Nanayakkara as the CEO in October the same year.

Bharti Airtel Limited, a group company of Bharti
Enterprises, is India's leading integrated telecom services
provider with an aggregate of over 85.5 million customers as
of end of November 2008, consisting of 82.92 million mobile
customers.

Bharti Airtel is structured into three strategic business
units - Mobile services, Telemedia services and Enterprise
services.

The company has two international landing stations in
Chennai that connects two submarine cable systems - i2i to
Singapore and SEA-ME-WE-4 to Europe. PTI TVS