Co had near-death experience: Mittal on Bharti's journey

As he stands on the cusp of heading the largest emerging market telecom company, Bharti Airtel 's Chairman and Managing Director Sunil Mittal says his company emerged stronger from a near-death experience despite all odds. He also seems to have forgiven old rivals - the Ambani brothers. CNBC-TV18's Kenan Machado reports.
Here is a verbatim transcript of Kenan Machado's comments on CNBC-TV18. Also watch the accompanying video.

Sunil Mittal may soon get to run the world's largest emerging market telecom player, Bharti-MTN, and though talks are still on, he says Bharti's journey till here was riddled with problems.

"When I joined Bharti Airtel that was a period when services were allowed to be brought in through different varieties, different ways and the competition was unjust, unfair, regulation was stacked against us and for a company which was just about to begin making an impact on the country had a moment of near death," Mittal says.

Mittal may have been alluding to the grant of all-India roaming to wireless local loop (WLL) and the unified access license (UAL), which let companies like Reliance Communications and Tata Teleservices among others to offer all India services and enter the GSM space by paying only Rs 1,648 crore against many millions spent by GSM players for licence in various cirles across India. In an interview to CNBC-TV18, Mittal said regulations favoured some players but added that he respected Reliance's determination.

"Well you know we may be a real paradox of sorts here. We have had very poor hands dealt to us in the last five or six years," he recalls. "Successive regulatory moves have gone against us. If you start tracking each one of those you know there have been sort of unfair to us and and at the benefit of perhaps someone else."

"I would say that having faced that competition, Reliance is a determined lot. They are passionate about what they do; they are very intelligent in their businesses. I have to say in all fairness, the telecom network that they launched at that time Mukesh was leading the charge, it was unprecedented. We were doing incremental stuff and they came in and said we will lay out 80,000 km of fibre, we have the best NOC in the country, and in about 18 to 24 months they had a network which is unparalleled."

And as he stands at the verge of creating telecom history, Mittal may only wish all the effort was well worth it.