NEW DELHI, INDIA: Bharti Airtel's overseas acquisition plans have been put on hold for the time being, its chief executive said on Thursday.
Manoj Kohli said this in response to a question on overseas expansion plans, at the fourth edition of India Telecom 2009 here, which was inaugurated by Telecom Minister A Raja.
Contrary to the perception that pay-per-second is likely to lead to a loss of revenue, Bharti Airtel's CEO said that the strategy has "worked pretty well and we have had stable additions in the month of November", according to a Voice&Data report.
Kohli also indicated that the number additions by the operators every month might not be reflecting the real additions.
"Sometimes,numbers reflect only SIMs and no customer. If we look at India, only about 80 per cent would be active users. Real customer additions would be in single digits in millions," Kohli said.
"India has fantastic affordability and it should continue to enjoy that. I have never heard any villager saying that tariffs are high," he further added.
Analysts have said Bharti could look at overseas expansion as its home market saturates and fierce competition gnaws away call charges that are already the world's cheapest.
Earlier on Thursday, Indian state-run telecoms firm Bharat Sanchar Nigam Ltd's chairman said the firm is looking at smaller deals in Africa, but declined to comment on plans for Kuwait's Zain.
India, with 488.40 million mobile phones in use by end October, has more users than any country other than China.
With a record 16.7 million mobile users added in October, India is the world's fastest growing market for such services and has attracted foreign and domestic firms.
Norway's Telenor will be the twelfth operator when it launches services on Thursday.
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Kohli said call rates in India were already affordable but left open a question on whether Bharti would respond to cuts by other operators.
"That is a market situation," he said.
Bharti and other Indian operators have been forced to follow aggressive billings plans by sixth largest operator Tata Teleservices, which has shot to the top of the monthly user adds chart for three straight months to October.
Kohli said Bharti's November additions would not swing much from the past trend. The firm added 2.7 million users in October to take its subscriber base to 113.21 million.
On Wednesday, Tata Tele said its November user growth was close to the 3.9 million added in October.
"We've had very stable growth and we'll continue with stable growth," Kohli said.
(With inputs from Reuters)