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Bharti Airtel has recently come out with its new prepaid plans for the customers of Blackberry which will provide them an option to select from weekly and monthly plans with unlimited Email access and internet facilities.

These new prepaid plans will enable the Airtel Blackberry users to enjoy wide array of services including unlimited access to their Emails, social networking, Instant Messaging, Blackberry Messenger, Internet browsing and access to Blackberry AppWorld application store. These latest plans introduced by Airtel will come with an affordable price tags starting from Rs.100 a week to Rs.399 a month.

The plans will allow the users of Blackberry to have access up to 10 email accounts like Yahoo mail, Google Mail and Hotmail. The services of chat will be available on Google Talk, Yahoo Messenger and Windows Live Messenger. More over the emails from multiple mail boxes can also be displayed in a single inbox and service also enables to view the attachments of emails.

For all those people who are eagerly waiting for the much hyped Apple iPhone 4, there seems to be a good news from Bharti Airtel as Sanjay Kapoor, the CEO of Bharti at the recent CII industry conference stated that “ We are working with Apple…hopefully in the September-October time frame we would launch the phone”

Though much details regarding the talks is not disclosed by Airtel but the company is stating that they will make the iPhone 4 available in the Indian markets by September and October this year.

Earlier, Vodafone has also made an announcement that they will bring in the iPhone 4 in the country but they did not mentioned any time frame for the launch.

While talking about the 3G, Kapoor stated that huge network of the 3G is ready and the company is working on aggressive timeline. On BWA services he stated that “BWA has certain choices and we are looking at options and hopefully in few weeks we will be able to finalise that.”

India’s Bharti Airtel has submitted a petition in the Supreme Court of Sri Lanka so as to put a halt on the minimum mobile phone price plan which is launched by the telecom regulator.

Due to the tough  competition which resulted into huge losses the Telecommunications Regulatory Commission has recently has fixed a floor price of 2 Sri Lankan Rupees per minute for the outgoing calls.

The mobile phones were launched in Sri Lanka in the year 1989 , and since then it was first time in the year 2009 that the phone operators has incurred a combined loss of 23 billion rupees which is around $200 million.

Sri Lanka is a 5 player mobile market with Bharti Airtel being the 5^th entry and the company stated that the fixing of these floor prices are against the interest of the consumers.

While submitting its petition in the Sri Lankan Supreme Court, Airtel stated that these floor prices will only prove to be helpful for the leader of the market and will maintain the status quo at the consumer’s interest.

Bharti Airtel has recently stated that social networking site Facebook can be accessed by the Airtel subscribers on their mobile for free of cost for the next 2 months till 31^st August. Airtel has entered into a partnership with the Facebook so that 130 million subscribers can log on to the full mobile site of Facebook at no data cost though their mobile phones.

Initially the Facebook mobile site will be available in Hindi and English along with 5 other languages including Bengali, Punjabi, Tamil, Malayalam and Telugu which will follow by 15^th of July 2010.

The Chief Marketing Officer, Mobile Services of Bharti Airtel, Shireesh Joshi stated that “Our mobile customers will also be the first in the world to enjoy Facebook on their Airtel mobile in five vernacular languages.”

The existing customer of Airtel mobile internet can avail the services immediately whereas the customers who are accessing the mobile internet for the first time will have to SMS, FACEBOOK to 54321 in order to avail the services.

It has been recently announced by Bharti Airtel that their application store, Airtel App Central has seen 13 million applications downloads within the time frame of 4 months since its launch. It is being stated by the company that at an average their mobile subscribers download at the rate of 1.2 applications per second over 4 months.

In the month of February this year, Bharti Airtel entered into the mobile applications market with the launch of its Airtel App Central. It was claimed by the company that within 30 days of launching the store, 2.5 million applications were downloaded.

In the month of March, the application store of the company had more than 1500 apps which can be downloaded over 550 devices.

At present Airtel offers over 71,000 apps which can be downloaded on more than 780 devices. The mobile customers of Airtel can make a choice in applications from 25 categories including games, business, social networking, health, education, travel and others.

The president mobile services of Bharti Airtel, Atul Bindal stated that “Airtel customers have identified our easy single click purchase mechanism as the most popular aspect of the store. With over 32 per cent of downloads paid for, App Central is also emerging as the preferred destination for existing and upcoming developers in India and the world over.”

Bharti Airtel has recently appointed Ogilvy Africa for providing the services of brand building in Airtel’s African operations. Ogilvy Africa will help to guide Airtel in long term  brand building across the African Continent and will provide overall creative direction , media planning and buying of Airtel’s business of Africa. Ogilvy Africa will also execute the campaign in each of the African markets of Airtel.

The account size and the marketing and brand building expenses for the African operations were not disclosed by the company. Earlier Ogilvy Africa was engaged with Zain for planning and media buying service across Africa. The acquisition of Zain Mobile operations spread over 15 countries in Africa has been completed by Bharti Airtel on 8^th of June this year.

By the end of October, Airtel expects to launch its own brand in these 15 countries. The International chief executive of Bharti Airtel, Manoj Kholi  stated that “We are delighted to be partnering Ogilvy Africa in our endeavour to take the Airtel brand deep into the heart of every market we operate in. We believe we have the right partner to successfully take forward our brand strategy.” Moreover the Global Chief Executive of  Ogilvy Group, Miles Young said that “This deal represents a further significant step forward for Ogilvy and Scangroup in Africa.”

Bharti Airtel has recently announced that it will have strategic alliance with VMware which is a USA based software maker for the services of cloud computing which will expand its managed services portfolio. The cloud based software services are offered through web without any need for software and it is used to reduce the cost.

The cloud based IT services will be offered by Airtel on the trademark of VMware vSphere platform. The company has also made an announcement that it will join the VMware Service Provider Program (VSPP).

This latest service will be available to the enterprise customers on the basis of pay per use model. The service will also include web services, database, mail, file, co-location, disaster recovery and other managed services.

The service for the end users will prove to be a cost optimization tool and it will help to reduce the space power, management, operating system and others. Better management of IT capacity along with improved security and optimized resource allocation will be provided by the services.

Bharti Airtel soon after closing the deal for acquisition of Zain Telecom has stated that they will introduce the concept of “affordable tariffs” which will lead to the condition of price war in the continent.

The CEO and In Charge of International Operations of Bharti Airtel, Manoj Kohli stated that they will not go for the tariff cut but will go for the concept of long term affordability strategy which will prove to be good for the customers as well as for the company.

He also stated that “The monthly usage is 60-70 minutes per customer in Africa against 450-500 minutes in India. There is a pent-up demand. Tariffs are high in Africa. Our objective is not to introduce low tariffs in Africa… Our objective is affordability. We will see what is the level of affordability normal customer wants.”

The multiple tariff plans and cheaper call rates have pushed up the subscriber base in India where 13-15 million of users are added every month.

Airtel plans to launch more tariff plans which will suit the profile and the pay capability of the customer in each of the 15 African countries.

It is being expected by Bharti Airtel that their African assets of Kuwaiti firm Zain Telecom will be concluded very soon. This acquisition cost around 9 billion USD to the company.

Bharti has also announced that they will invest $800 million in order to build network for Zain Africa. Deputy group chief executive of the company, Akhil Gupta stated that the company is in process to gather all the regulatory approvals of the deal and the process is going smoothly. He also stated that as soon as they will receive all the approvals they will close the deal.

The focus of Bharti Airtel is in the conclusion of this Zain deal so that they can include it in their balance sheet. Gupta also stated that they are looking for opportunities in order to raise equity for the tower business. In March this year Bharti Airtel had a $9 billion deal to acquire the assets of Zain in 15 countries of Africa.

phones4u

After the success of iPhone, Apple Inc. is now aiming to create market for their new device iPhone 3GS in India. To serve the purpose the auction was held in which various companies from India submitted their bid. The biggest mobile brand in India, Bharti Airtel, stated that it has grabbed the contract with Apple sp as to release the new version of this bestseller in the Indian markets.

The company stated that as per the contract, they will be allowed to bring the device in the market but confirm date is not yet declared. The triumphant bidders will be allowed to offer the services of 3GS on commercial basis from September this year. Mobile industry in India is continuously progressing and rising in financial and technological manner. This new device will no doubt provide a boom to this market and will be beneficial to both customers and service providers. Now the time will decide whether this phone will follow tradition of success or not.