AT HEART, Sunil Bharti Mittal is quite the fierce fighter. The 68-year-old held strong and fought back when faced with one of the biggest adversities — one that could have shattered his business — a decade ago. Back then, Mukesh Ambani, India’s richest, unleashed a brutal and gruelling price war in India’s telecom space, offering free calls and cheap data in a sector that had already been struggling with heavy debt loads, massive spectrum auction costs, and infrastructure upgrade expenses.

While the entry of Reliance Jio broke many and paved the way for India’s telecom sector to become a duopoly of sorts, Mittal and his company, Bharti Airtel, held fast. Today, Airtel closely follows Jio in market share and has been adding more consumers than its Mumbai-headquartered rival regularly.

In the process, over the past 10 years, Airtel’s market cap has grown by 766.38% on a point-to-point basis at a CAGR of 24.10%, highlighting investor confidence despite intense competition, even as it changed its strategy to focus on high-value clients, offering better internet speeds and user experience. More importantly, over the past few years, Mittal has also been steering Airtel towards diversification beyond being just a mobile and wireless internet provider, turning its attention to data centres, cloud, financial services, and satellite connectivity, among others. The company currently has a market capitalisation of more than ₹12.12 lakh crore.

Mittal — ranked fifth with a net worth of ₹2,83,997 crore ($29.83 billion) in 2026, according to Fortune India’s study of India’s Top 100 Billionaires —mentions in the company's annual report: “Airtel’s investments are directed towards harnessing new growth engines for India that rest on the foundation of a resilient and secure digital infrastructure.”

Perhaps, Mittal’s crowning moment came in 2024, when Bharti Enterprises (the parent entity of Bharti Airtel), through its international investment arm Bharti Global, acquired a 24.5% stake in the U.K.-based telecommunications major BT Group for approximately $4 billion. This purchase from billionaire Patrick Drahi’s Altice UK made Bharti the single-largest shareholder in BT Group, the U.K.’s largest provider of fixed-line, broadband, and mobile services.

Coincidentally, in 1997, BT had acquired a 21% stake in the then fledgeling Bharti Airtel (then known as Bharti Tele-Ventures), which had launched commercial operations under the Airtel brand in 1995. Today, Airtel has over 650 million customers in 17 countries, with its Africa business contributing over 150 million users. “Over the past 10 years, Airtel has invested significantly, over ₹3.3 lakh crore, in creating one of India’s strongest digital infrastructure platforms,” Mittal said in the annual report. “The emergence of the 5G economy is defining the next phase of growth, enabling new use cases across industries. With widespread network availability, 5G is accelerating the shift towards high-speed, low-latency connectivity and unlocking new avenues for innovation.”

Today, much of the group’s focus has shifted to three key areas: financial services, data centres, and cloud, alongside its core telecom business. In its telecom business, the company has been seeing a huge uptick lately, with its postpaid user base growing by over a million users in the April-June quarter this year, its highest ever, on the back of a slicing technology to improve customer experience. Postpaid customers accounted for about 8% of its total user base.

“Medium-term ARPU growth would be driven by premiumisation initiatives such as customer upgrades to unlimited plans, rising postpaid adoption led by Fastlane, feature phone-to-smartphone upgrades, international roaming and higher data consumption,” brokerage firm Motilal Oswal said in a report.

But it’s the new-age businesses that will drive much of Bharti Airtel’s growth in the coming years. Of this, the company’s newest financial services business, Airtel Money Ltd, has already received approval from the Reserve Bank of India to operate as a non-deposit-taking non-banking financial company (NBFC). Bharti Enterprises, the promoter group, has already earmarked plans to invest ₹20,000 crore over the next five years to build the business.

“The business represents a natural adjacency that leverages Airtel’s large customer base to build a meaningful new growth engine and further diversify the company’s portfolio,” Mittal said in the annual report.

Already, Airtel Payments Bank, set up in 2015, has over 120 million monthly active users and some 30 million customers with bank accounts. A payments bank is a restricted-scale bank that can accept limited deposits, offer debit cards, and handle money transfers, but cannot issue loans or credit cards. Last year, Airtel Payments Bank had posted total revenues of ₹3,207 crore, with profits of ₹109 crore. Another arm, Airtel Finance, offers personal loans and credit card services to its customers and has already disbursed about ₹9,500 crore in lifetime loans.

Then there is the data centre business, Nxtra Data Ltd, set up in 2013 as Bharti Airtel’s data centre subsidiary. The business has over 120 edge data centres and around 14 large data centres in cities such as Mumbai, Pune, Bengaluru, Chennai, the National Capital Region and Bhubaneswar. Around half of the company’s revenues come from Bharti Airtel, and the remaining from around 300 enterprise and some hyperscaler clients, spanning across global cloud providers, large enterprises, government, and small and mid-sized businesses (SMBs), including marquee tech companies.

In March this year, Nxtra announced a $1-billion investment by private equity firms Alpha Wave Global, Carlyle, and Anchorage Capital, through their affiliates. Airtel also participated in the round. The investment signals the massive money chasing the country’s data centre sector, which is expected to grow at a CAGR of around 21% between 2024 and 2030 to reach nearly 3,400 MW of IT capacity. “India’s rapid digitisation, rising cloud adoption and increasing data localisation requirements make this a compelling long-term opportunity,” Mittal said in the annual report. Nxtra now plans to increase its data centre capacity to 1GWh over the next three to four years, and raise market share from 12% currently at 120-130 MW to 25%.

Even as it does that, Airtel and Mittal have also taken a gamble with its cloud business, launched last year with the capability to handle 1,400 million transactions per minute for Airtel’s own use in India; the services also provide an AI-powered software platform that will help telcos around the world rid themselves of underlying complexity, improve customer experience, lower churn, and raise average revenue per user.

India’s cloud services market was estimated at $8.3 billion in 2023 and is expected to grow to $24.2 billion by 2028, according to the International Data Corp. The launch had come a month after the telco announced a partnership with AI-powered search engine Perplexity, offering a 12-month free subscription to its customers. Airtel’s cloud business also puts it in competition with the likes of Reliance JioCloud, and Tata Communications Vayu, as Indian cloud providers try to take on hyperscalers such as Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Google Cloud.

The home-grown service providers are positioning themselves as affordable and secure alternatives with cost savings of 30-50%. “Demand remains particularly strong for sovereign cloud solutions from regulated sectors and PSUs,” Motilal Oswal said in a report. “The first phase of large investment is done and going ahead, it will likely be modular.”

All that means that the telecom heavyweight is now gearing up for an era of diversification and transformation. “Bharti Airtel continues to maintain its relative strength among peers in a consolidated industry,” brokerage firm ICICI Direct said in a report. “With a formidable digital ecosystem offering and overall efforts through premiumisation and higher wallet share, the industry-leading ARPU, wireless margins and cash flows are reflective of the same.”

Then there is the grand plan Mittal has put in place for succession, wherein the next generation, who are already building their own businesses, would become increasingly visible “at the shareholders’ table”. Mittal has twin sons, Kavin and Shravin, and a daughter Eiesha Pasricha, who is a London-based entrepreneur and investor. While Kavin had been building Hike, a messenger platform that later pivoted to gaming before shutting down, Shravin is a founder at Unbound, a technology investment firm, and the MD for Bharti Global Ltd, the investment arm of Bharti Enterprises.

“If you really asked me, my own wish is that in the next decade, as I kind of come to a point where I hand over the reins to the next generation, as shareholders, Bharti Telecom should get back to a controlling shareholding of 51%, or just over 50%,” Mittal had said earlier this year. “So that’s 10% more to go, and for a company of this magnitude and size, that is not a small task.”

But Mittal knows best. After all, for many decades, he has weathered many storms to build his family business into a powerhouse. He is now ready for the next big leap.