Bharti

Bharti Airtel appoints Gopal Vittal as Director Marketing & Communications & Carol Borghesi as Director - Customer Service Delivery

New Delhi, September 28, 2006 : Bharti Airtel, India’s leading mobile services provider announced the appointment of Gopal Vittal as Director - Marketing & Communication, and Carol Borghesi as Director - Customer Service Delivery. They will report to Manoj Kohli – President Bharti Airtel and will also be part of the Airtel Management Board.

Gopal Vittal will succeed Hemant Sachdev, who now takes over as the Corporate Director marketing for Bharti group. Gopal brings with him more than 16 years of rich experience across various aspects of marketing and sales. He started his career with Unilever India, working across geographies in India and Asia. He has led several branding forays for Unilever and was responsible for conceptualizing, leading, piloting and rolling out Project Bharat, Unilever’s largest rural marketing initiative in India. Prior to joining Airtel, Gopal was leading the 1.3 Billion Euro laundry category in Asia. Gopal has also been recognized as one of India’s Hottest Young Executives by Business Today (2006).

Carol Borghesi joins Bharti Airtel after completing 26 years of building unmatched customer and service standards. She has worked extensively on assignments in telecom, retail and technology domains. Prior to joining Bharti Airtel, Carol was the Managing Director of 21st Century Customer Experience, a critical division of 21C, which is responsible for British Telecom's 10 billion pound investment for transforming the core network, systems architecture, portfolio and customer experience. Carol is recognized as an exemplary leader in the United Kingdom and Europe, managing and transforming the customer service and customer related operations domain.

Manoj Kohli, President Bharti Airtel said, “Customer service excellence and Innovation are two strategic pillars on which rests our vision of becoming the most admired brand in India by 2010. I am confident that Gopal and Carol’s rich experience will take our brand to a new high by setting new industry benchmarks”.

Gopal Vittal will play a key role in leading Airtel’s marketing and brand initiatives. His focus will be to not only sustain but enhance the organisation's positioning amongst its customers and key stakeholders. Carol Borghesi will further drive Bharti Airtel's vision of becoming the most admired brand by the year 2010 through outstanding customer service delivery systems.

About Bharti Airtel Limited : Bharti Airtel Limited is one of India’s leading private sector providers of telecommunications services with an aggregate of 27.24 million customers as of end of August‘06, consisting of 25.65 million mobile customers. Bharti Airtel has been rated among 10 best performing companies in the world in the BusinessWeek IT 100 list.

Bharti Airtel is structured into three strategic business units – Mobile services, Broadband & Telephone (B&T) services and Enterprise services. The mobile business provides mobile & fixed wireless services using GSM technology across 23 telecom circles. The B&T business provides broadband & telephone services in 92 cities. The Enterprise services provide end to end telecom solutions to corporate customers and national & international long distance services to carriers. All these services are provided under the Airtel brand. Airtel’s high-speed optic fibre network currently spans over 35,000 kms covering all the major cities in the country. The company has two international landing stations in Chennai that connects two submarine cable systems – i2i to Singapore and SEA-ME-WE-4 to Europe. For more information, visit www.bhartiairtel.in