The short history of the Bharti Airtel stock could well be the coming of age story of the Indian telecom industry. A lame beginning, followed by doubts and disquiets, then the breakthrough. When Bharti went public in January 2002, its issue, priced at Rs 45 a share, hardly elicited the response worthy of an industry leader in the making. For a good two years, the stock languished in the backdrop of a sluggish stock market and a service that was still seen as the preserve of a few.

A string of policy changes intended to take mobile telephony to the masses — like migration from a fixed licence fee regime to a revenue-sharing regime, radical cuts in call charges and free incoming calls — opened the subscriber floodgates for Bharti. On July 14, the Bharti stock closed at Rs 362 an eight-bagger in barely two years.

In terms of subscriber growth and business evolution, it’s a similar story for most other service providers also. But on the stock market, Bharti has been the lone star in the telecom fraternity.Unfortunately, for investors, much of this high subscriber growth has largely bypassed them. For an industry that captures, besides shaping, India’s rising incomes and changing demographics, telecom is barely represented on the bourses. There are just four listed telecom service providers: Bharti, MTNL, Reliance Communications and Tata Teleservices (Maharashtra).

Even, among these, MTNL and Tata Teleservices offer, at best, a limited exposure to the Indian telecom story. MTNL is present only in Delhi and Mumbai; its bread-and-butter business, landlines, is a saturated segment in those two cities; and its prospective merger with BSNL, which could be its saviour, is a perennial on-off affair. As for the Tatas, though they are gradually building a pan-India presence in telecom, their listed entity, Tata Tele, covers only Maharashtra. That leaves only two listed players with a national presence, though that number could increase with Hutch-Essar and BSNL planning to list.

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