HT Leadership Summit | 'India Needs Its Own Cloud': Sunil Bharti Mittal

Well, Amitabh, thank you for that wonderful introduction. Great pleasure to be here this afternoon. We were not merely importing telephones, we were actually manufacturing telephones. We were India's first pioneers in bringing push button telephones to India. Things were going reasonably well, but I recall that by late 80s early 90s I recognized that things were not going as fast as one could have imagined, and I could see many of my fellow entrepreneurs accelerating. Something had to give. For an entrepreneur, you need to move fast, you need to catch up with peers, you need to stay ahead of the trend, and there was a burning desire to look for a breakthrough product. We had done telephones, cordless telephones. We even tried answering machines which were not that successful in this country, fax machines. But it was in 1991, 25 crores in sales, 5 crores in profit. We were making some name through Beetle Telephones, but it was really not good enough. I still recall waking up on the 2nd of January 1992 in Goa with Nina, my kids at that time, some friends, and going through the Economic Times, buried in page five an innocuous government ad saying the government invites tenders for PMTS, public mobile telephone services. Just imagine if I would have missed seeing that ad. It was really buried somewhere down there. Where I would have ended up today, I don't know. But that just changed my life. I was a man possessed after looking at that ad. I had seen mobile telephones, the radio phones during the Asian Games and some other parts of the world. Early days, I said this is where I'm going to go. I remember telling Rajan and Rakesh, I said there are three months. In these three months, we have to put a bid together for something we have no idea about, and I think it's going to cost a lot of money just putting this bid together, forget putting a project. On the 12th of January, we suddenly had a tragedy in the family. My father passed away. That was 10 days later. It was very sudden. I still remember doing all his ceremonies post death. I took my mother's permission to travel and I didn't come back until I brought the bid back. That bid was the most extensive bid the government had ever seen. I had done helicopter surveys in Bombay and Delhi. I had done satellite imagery. I learned the business in those three months. Most of the time I was in the UK learning the trade. Our bid was then selected to be given a license in each of the four metros. But then the minister ruled, knowing who we are, a small little tiny company, one company will get one license. We got Mumbai because we scored the highest, went through high court, supreme court. Finally we were demoted by one grade and came to Delhi, which in any case was my first choice. Given that we don't have too much time here, I would say the rest is history.

Well, by 2006-07, we were very well established in India. We had scale, we had balance sheet, we had no debt at that point in time. I could see many of my troops getting very restless, wanting to do more. We started to cast a net outside. We tried in Botswana. We didn't get a license. We got a license in Seychelles. We launched ourselves there. Went to Sri Lanka. But we needed something meteoric, something really big. After two aborted attempts in Africa of acquiring MTN, we finally landed up acquiring Zain, $10.7 billion in 2010. A very large sum of money. At that point in time, it was a big bold bet that we made. At that time the only other big bet was done by Tatas through Corus steel, GLR, and this was the second biggest deal coming out of India. 16 countries in one fell swoop in sub-Saharan Africa, a place we didn't know very well. Accepting it's an emerging market, it should be more or less like India; if we have been able to do it here, we'll do it there as well. We put together a ragtag team of people, two plane loads, sent them there, started to develop Africa, and I must say it was the right decision if you look at it today. But the first 10 years were very hard. The lessons that we learned were unlike India. There is no middle class in Africa. There's either a very affluent segment of society or there are lots of poor people. The rates were very high. We went and did the same playbook, lowered the rates. But what we found was people who saved that money bought cooking oil, medicines, probably put another child into school, but never consumed more telephone connections or calls at that time. We had to unlearn very quickly that you cannot invest billions of dollars expecting customers to come. In India, it was very easy. You put up a cell tower, you had distribution, people would buy SIM cards, you lower prices, more people came, you lower further, even more came. That was a big unlearning. So the first seven, eight, nine years were really very bad. It was like a shock. Then we started to repair ourselves, and the last four or five years the company has now stabilized. It's a FTSE 50 company. It's a 15 billion African entity, one of the leading players in Africa. Whenever you go into these 15 countries, you'll be very proud to see Airtel in a leadership position there.

Well, I wouldn't call it players. I'll call it a player because other players we could manage reasonably comfortably. This one player was of course difficult. 2002, 2003 was our first encounter. Difficult one. The question was not if, the question was when will we shut down. And we came out of that with some difficulty. Lot of bruises, probably deep cuts, but we managed to come out. Shift to 2010 when in a surprise move the player picked up the spectrum. We knew the playbook. Six years you could see because the launch happened in 2016. September 2010 they got the spectrum. Those six years we could see the buildup of artillery, the troops. We had time. Lot of other people probably underestimated what was coming. We knew the power of the tsunami was going to be a tectonic shift on the plates of the telecom industry. These six years gave us a lot of time to bolster our defenses. When the tsunami hit, eight, nine players just completely got destroyed. I think we stood firm. One of the reasons was we knew the game, we knew the industry. But if I have to put one single factor into why we could survive and others could not, it was about our people. The talent in this industry counts for everything. If your people are motivated, if they were inspired, if they were charged up, it didn't matter who they were fighting. When I was traveling across the country at that time, I was going from one state to another almost all the time. I could see it on the faces of the people. They wouldn't care; they will do what is required and that is to serve the customer. I tell you, if you have a team which is inspired, they can do great things. So the battle was fought in the marketplace really completely, completely a bit in the regulatory area as well.

Yeah, I was a part of OneWeb long years back along with some other pioneers. But I came out of it after two years because I couldn't see it successfully getting put together. Then we were invited again during the COVID time, in the lockdown period, by the British government to revive this company to have a European UK play in satellite, because you could see satellite communication or satellite connectivity was coming through. The fact is there are still two billion people in the world who have no connectivity. Whatever we may do, my industry has been trying across the globe, spending hundreds of billions of dollars every year. You can't bring a fiber to them. It's impossible. You can't even bring a radio signal to them. So the only way was through satellite connectivity. But the geostationary satellites that had about 36,000 km, they had 560 to 570 milliseconds of latency. You can't give them today's product which is video and streaming requirements or real-time telemetry. You can't do it on those speeds. You can do broadcasting very well. LEO held hope, but it was being questioned all the time. I would say OneWeb was actually ahead of even Starlink. But then came Elon Musk and he started launching in the LEO 350-400 kilometer range, putting up thousands of satellites which we all see now, and the game changed completely. So as a telecom company, if you don't move into that area where let's say 20,000 satellites, call them cell towers in space, can serve the entire globe, you will be missing a very important area of defense. That was the reason why we went into space. But having recognized that OneWeb will still have a limitation, we have tied up with Starlink in India and Africa. You can raise your hand anywhere in the world and you can be connected now. This was the holy grail of our industry. I think that has been firmly established now.

Look, we are a company which understands the need of our customers, and I believe we do a good job with that. We follow what the needs of the customers are and match it with technology. We don't produce any technology ourselves. Currently, given the geopolitical issues we saw, we heard a lot from Dr. J. Shankar just now, sovereign cloud or Bharat cloud, call it whatever you want, is a necessity now. We cannot rely just on Google cloud or Microsoft or Amazon. They will have their role to play. But if you want to run banking services, India's digital records, government services, critical defense applications, you will need to have a sovereign cloud.

Yeah, but data is flowing through your Facebook, your search engines all the time. In any case, that's a separate debate. We can talk about it. But we will be securing India's data where it's required to be stored. Not necessarily retail customer data, but enterprise customer data in India. We are now connecting banks. We are connecting enterprises. We are the go-to person for the government orders that will sit into the cloud here. But just to expand on your question, we are a digital connectivity player first and foremost. We build billions of dollars of infrastructure every year. We get spectrum and get it through radio as well so that the customer can get it from wherever they are. But networks became from just pure digital connectivity provider to intelligent networks to now supremely intelligent networks.

Yeah. One is basic infrastructure. I think that's the fundamental need. What do these large consuming, guzzling GPUs need? Power. Land of course is plentiful here. We need to have more power, hopefully green power, because it requires so much power that you'll heat the entire globe. And then you need people to start working on our local LLMs. There's 1.5 billion people here, enough data floating through our networks. We need to have our local people building our own LLMs to ensure that we are one of the players in AI, not just a pure consumer of AI as you mentioned on Perplexity or anything else.

We are in data centers. We are one of the leading players. We are at about 250 megawatts at the moment. We just signed a 300 megawatt single site with Google in Andhra Pradesh, Visakhapatnam. Yes, more is coming. So we will scale up to a gigawatt fairly quickly and that work is going on.