Bharti Announced Organizational Changes in Its India and South Asia Operations

Bharti has announced major changes to its organization structure which will be effective from Aug 1, 2011. These changes intended to help the organization in transforming it from a 'technology' facing organization to 'customer' facing organization. In order to achieve that, Bharti wanted to segregate its business based on the customers and created two verticals, namely, 'Business to Customer' (B2C) and 'Business to Business' (B2B).

Various business units - Mobile, telemedia, Digital TV, and other emerging businesses like M-Commerce, M-health, M-advertising etc were combined to service the retail consumers, homes and small offices by Bharti Airtel's B2C business unit. The B2C organization will consist of Consumer Business and Market Operations

The B2C strategy is to be led by Consumer Business group. The strategy focuses on customer experience, product and service innovation (including data, VAS, new products/services), and build an ecosystem around the B2C services. K Srinivas will lead this vertical as the President, Consumer Business.

Market Operations group will lead the 'go-to-market' strategy. This vertical focuses on taking products and services to customers in South Asia with speed and efficiency. Market Operations will complement the Consumer Business by building a robust 'go-to-market' ecosystem and leverage Bharti Airtel's vast distribution reach.

Bharti Airtel is the largest telecom service provider in the country and the most preferred supplier of communications. With increased globalization, high use of IT and businesses spanning across boundaries, corporate rely more on the communication infrastructure. Moreover, corporate segment is a high margin segment and mostly is not as volatile as the consumer segment. Thus, providing a steady flow of income along with high profit margins. It is apt for the company to have separate verticals for the two segments as they are entirely different categories of users with different needs. Many technology product companies such as Dell also have separate services and sales divisions for the two segments. There is a high cost associated with downtime in case of corporations and therefore they need increased focus and service levels. This move of separation into two different verticals would help in following different strategies for the two segments and this restructuring seems to be in sync with the long term growth strategy of the company. This move is also said to provide enhanced empowerment to employees.

The division of B2C into Consumer Service and Market Operations aligns with the Bharti Airtel's strategy of focussing on core areas. Bharti is said to be the first telecom company to outsource all its operations except sales, marketing and finance. Its logic is to make use of best available resources in each of the field. For instance, it believed who else understand networks better