If you were Bharti, what major concerns would you have about entering an outsourcing agreement with IBM? With Ericson, Nokia or Siemens?

Bharti Airtel started as a very small company with only $900 capital. Who would have imagined it would have become India biggest Telecom Company. Today, Airtel is the largest provider of mobile telephony and second largest provider of fixed telephony in India, and is also a provider of broadband and subscription television services. It offers its telecom services under the "Airtel" brand, and is headed by Sunil Bharti Mittal. It also acts as a carrier for national and international long distance communication services.

Concerns with IBM, Nokia, Ericson and Siemens
When Bharti was going through crises of capital expenditures, Gupta introduced two proposals for their benefit. One was to combine with IBM and another was to Nokia, Ericson and Siemens. Their strategy was to hand over the full responsibility of buildup, maintenance and servicing of the telecom network to equipment vendors. As IT technology is not an easily available and cheap market. It does require a lot of investment money to go in. At that stage-when Gupta made the proposal-Bharti didn’t had much. So from the point of a chairman it was the best solution to get the outsourcing done. “The advantages that it has was uncertainty in expenditure would have been low, transferring risk equipment risk to the vendors, pay for use and avoid capacity wastage”(Applegate, Austin & Soule, 2009).

Bharti was concerned because they thought their work ethics does not meet with these big companies and cultural differences might come into play. Plus giving maximum power in hands of vendors would limit the creative aspect of the company. As mentioned by Applegate, Austin & Soule “ Bharti is a much smaller company, an Indian company. We have a different way of working