Gopal Vittal, the CEO who grew Airtel's market cap roughly ₹1 trn annually for 12 years on the trot

Over the last nine-ten years, India's telecom sector has been buffeted into submission by the entry of the country's richest and most powerful businessman into phone services. From 13 players in 2014, there are today just four companies remaining in the business — led by Mukesh Ambani's Reliance Jio Infocomm (Jio).

“So, while the launch [of Jio made disappear] six-seven companies and triggered consolidation, Airtel has stood its ground and grown," Bharti Enterprises founder and chairman Sunil Mittal said at the Hindustan Times Leadership Summit 2025 earlier this month.

“One single factor due to which we could survive was our people, the talent we had," he added.

Mittal might as well have named Gopal Vittal, Airtel's managing director and CEO of the last 12 years and the spearhead of transformation at the company badly rocked both by the vagaries of the market and the often greedy and hamhanded approach of regulators.

Vittal will move up as executive vice chairman starting 2026, Bharti Airtel first announced in October 2024 on the leadership transition, which was later followed with an update last week. “In his new role, besides oversight of the companies, Gopal will also be responsible for driving group synergies in the areas of digital and technology, network strategy, procurement and talent. He will also focus on Group strategy and future proofing the organization for the next evolution of its development," the company said in a statement on 18 December.

Shashwat Sharma has been appointed as MD and CEO of Bharti Airtel India effective 1 January 2026.

Emails sent to Bharti Airtel for comments from Vittal and Mittal did not elicit any response till the press time.

The 58-year-old first came under chairman Mittal's close watch when he was hired from Hindustan Unilever, India's top packaged consumer goods company, to run marketing for Airtel in 2006. That stint lasted just two years with Vittal returning to Unilever where he had built his career from 1990 after graduating from Indian Institute of Management - Calcutta.

Gearing up for battle

The beginning of the 2010s was also about the time Mittal saw the writing on the wall. He had just completed a $10.7 billion acquisition in Africa and knew the missing piece in his jigsaw for growth was his leadership. He took over two years to clear the decks for Vittal's return as director of special projects in 2012. Trusted lieutenant Manoj Kohli was sent to run the Africa business and CEO Sanjay Kapoor left in 2013.

Vittal took the corner office on 1 March 2013.

That was about the time the air was thick with expectation that Ambani was going to make the biggest splash in telecom history in India. It took long months of preparation but Mittal and Vittal were ready. The latter captured the bruising years ahead in his letter in the FY17 Airtel annual report. “As we look ahead, we expect an exciting but turbulent year – consolidation will continue and the new entrant will continue to disrupt the market. Internally, we view this as a once in a lifetime opportunity to grow market share…We are determined to drive this change despite the competitive headwinds," he wrote. Ambani's Reliance Industries had launched Reliance Jio in September 2016.

No one could have guessed how severely the sector would get upended over the few years. The new entrant’s pricing-led blitzkrieg forced rivals to drop their charges too. Consumers rejoiced but the companies folded up one by one. Reliance Communications and Aircel folded up. Vodafone India that had a strong presence in cities and the rural-dominant Idea Cellular merged. And the industry was left with three players: Reliance Jio, Bharti Airtel and Vodafone Idea, besides state-run Bharat Sanchar Nigam Ltd, which was even then an also-ran.

Cut to the present. Standing strong and unmarked in a scorched landscape is Airtel, a doughty survivor of the Reliance Jio juggernaut. Airtel's average revenue per user, or Arpu, a key metric in the telco business, was ₹193 in the March 2013, the quarter Vittal was made CEO. After years of a pricing war with Jio, its Arpu stands at ₹256, not even covering inflation in the time in between, but no. 1 in the market, nevertheless. Jio's Arpu is ₹211.4 and Vodafone Idea’s ₹167. Jio, however, has a substantial lead with 506 million subscribers as of September vs. Airtel's 364 million.

One strategy that worked for it: when Jio entered the market, Airtel did not chase subscriber volumes at the low-end but instead focused on retaining premium users by ensuring superior network quality.

An envy called Vittal

“There is an admiration and an envy that Airtel has Vittal," said a senior executive in Jio. On 1 March 2013, shares of Bharti Airtel were at ₹285.65 each. As of 22 December 2025, the shares were at ₹2,141.5 apiece — Airtel India’s market capitalization grew over 12 times to ₹12.2 trillion.

In the dozen years he's been MD & CEO, Vittal averaged growing Airtel's market capitalization by nearly ₹1 trillion annually. For perspective, that's creating value roughly equivalent to that of Havells India, Apollo Hospitals, Info Edge, or Lupin each year. Today, Airtel is the third most valued stock in India behind oil-to-retail-to-telecom conglomerate Reliance and HDFC Bank.

“I don't think any other company has survived such an insurmountable loss as Airtel and came back stronger," said Vivekanand Subbaraman, lead analyst for telecom and media at brokerage Ambit Capital, pointing to the gumption of Airtel under Mittal and Vittal snapping up weak telecom operators when the sector consolidated.

In 2016, Airtel acquired the rights to use of spectrum from Videocon. After a year, it completed the acquisition of Augere Wireless, then Norway’s Telenor operations in India. Then, in 2019, Airtel completed the acquisition of the consumer mobile businesses of the Tatas—all to strengthen its position in the market and compete with Jio.

Subbaraman lauded Vittal and Airtel for staying away from bidding for the expensive 700 MHz band in the 2022 5G auctions. The band is important as it provides better coverage especially indoors and the network deployment cost is also lower for telcos. In hindsight, its decision to stay away proved to be the right call: Indian telcos today are struggling to monetize 5G services.

Still, some bets could have been played better, another analyst said. Telecom expert Parag Kar said Airtel could have managed the adjusted gross revenue (AGR) dispute more effectively. “Early and proactive engagement with the government might have prevented the scale of the fallout. Prolonged litigation spanning two decades is inherently risky, especially when licence dues carry significant embedded interest and penalties," he said.

The almost two decade old AGR battle over statutory dues is still on and Airtel has dues worth ₹40,000 crore. For Vodafone Idea, which has AGR dues of ₹83,400 crore as of March end, a Supreme Court order that was pronounced in October this year, allowed the government to reassess its dues.

Ping pong, plucking the strings

Business schoolmates recalled that Vittal, who strummed the guitar at one of the oldest clubs of IIM Calcutta, JBS BaroC, liked taking on challenges head-on early on.

“He was my senior (Batch of 1990) at IIM Calcutta and even then, he was a no-nonsense chap. We saw him at times play a game of table tennis or play the guitar for the college band. From my interactions with him even when I was with BSE and now at NSE as Airtel customers, if there is something you have to discuss, come straight to the point and things get done," said Ashishkumar Chauhan, MD and CEO of NSE.

The next phase of competition in the Indian telecom industry will see focus moves to the enterprise segment, with telcos investing in AI-ready data centres, edge computing, and cloud infrastructure. In addition, the emerging satellite internet market will become another important area of competition in the sector.

The consumer end of services will go beyond voice and data. Telcos will focus on adding value for consumers by bundling digital services and offering AI-based applications. For example, Airtel is providing access to the generative AI platform Perplexity, while Jio has partnered with Google to offer Gemini to its users.

Vittal’s two decades at Unilever and in the FMCG sector may once again stand Airtel in good stead.

Godrej's Sitapati, an Unilever alum himself, recalled how Vittal changed Lifebuoy soap’s trajectory. The soap’s image was of a masculine , chunky carbolic soap . “Gopal pivoted the brand into a milled soap with a pleasant perfume targeted at families and positioned on germ protection. This radical move was responsible for not just the turnaround of Lifebuoy but also Hindustan Lever," he said.

Pallavi Chakravarti, founder and chief creative officer of ad services company Fundamental, who has worked with Vittal on ad campaigns for Airtel credited his instinct on what works for the consumer. “When we presented the zero complaints (ad campaign in 2020) to him, he loved it straight off the bat. Because he saw in it the threads of customer-centricity and transparency that define Airtel’s philosophy on-ground and have also come to embody the masterbrand tone of voice over the years," Chakravarti said.

"He’s extremely quick to spot pieces that build brand consistency," she added—one of the several traits in Vittal that his boss Mittal spotted nearly 20 years ago and made the best hiring bet in his life.