Bharti Airtel Ltd. and Aircel have both announced that the Apple iPhone 4 will be coming in India over the next several months. However both companies did not announced the specific dates for the launch. There are about 800 million mobile phone users in India. However only 5% of this population have smartphones. Bharti has 159 million mobile subscribers and Aircel has 53.5 million. [Reuters]

Bharti Airtel Ltd. in India saw close to a 27% drop in second quarter net profit. The drop happened because of higher interest costs and competition intensity. Bharti reported a net profit of 16.61 billion rupees ($375 million) for the quarter between July and September. One year ago during the same quarter, profit was 22.63 billion rupees. Although profit dropped, Bharti saw revenues increase by about 47%. Bharti’s revenue was 152.15 billion this quarter compared to 103.79 billion rupees a year ago. [WSJ]

Vodafone subsidiary in India, Vodafone Essar Ltd. has hit 100 million subscribers.  Vodafone is the third telecommunications company in India to hit this milestone.  The first two are Bharti Airtel Ltd. and Reliance Communications Ltd.  Vodafone also submitted bids to participate in an auction for 3G mobile services this past Friday. [WSJ]

India currently has a population of 1.14 billion people. One of the fast growing mobile market segments in the subcontinent are the rural areas. As a matter of fact Manoj Kohli of Bharti Airtel is predicting that there will be about a billion mobile phone users in India by 2015. His company alone plans to have about 200 million customers in the next few years.

“Achieving a billion plus (Indian mobile users) by 2015 is possible,” stated Kohli at the Mobile Asia Congress event. “The largest growth will happen in the rural market.” Currently there are about 400 million mobile phone users in India and about 600 million in China.

Earlier this month Twitter made a deal with Bharti Airtel. Airtel is one of the biggest telecommunications companies in India with about 100 million subscribers. The company launched an SMS service where users in India can update their tweets from mobile phones. The SMS tweets are a free additional service which inevitably will increase the popularity of Twitter in the Asian subcontinent. In order to promote the new service, Airtel is airing three new commercials that lets their customers know about the service. After the jump are the three commercials:

The number of mobile phone users in India is massive. The population in India is about 1.1 billion and many of them have mobile phones. People in India communicate very often with SMS and text messages. Now if Twitter connected their services by allowing people in India to tap their accounts into SMS and text messages, there would be a major increase in use. Twitter just made a deal with Bharti Airtel to make this happen. Bharti Airtel is the largest telecommunications company in India with 100 million subscribers.

Bharti Airtel customers will be allowed to receive SMS tweets for free and send tweets through a text message at the standard rate. The reason why Twitter shut down their SMS service last year in many other countries is because of the charges that telecommunication companies wanted from Twitter. Twitter has been trying to find the middle ground between telecommunication companies from now on.

To get started using Twitter on Airtel, customers need to send a text message saying START to the number 53000. After that Twitter confirms that you are willing to send and receive SMS tweets.

Bharti Airtel Limited (BOM:532454) is India’s largest mobile phone company and later this month the Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL) iPhone 3G will work on their network.  Airtel will introduce the iPhone 3G will introduce the phone in India on August 22.  This is part of Apple’s plan to introduce the phone across 70 different countries.

The iPhone 3G will be available for purchase at the Airtel customer service outlets.  Airtel aims to sell the iPhone in India before Vodafone Group Plc, another telecomm company with a strong presence in India.  India is currently the second largest wireless market in the world.  More wireless phone users have been added in India than China this past June.

Although India does third generation networks built yet, the country is beginning to auction licenses and spectrums for 3G networks.  The iPhone 3G availability in the country will very likely boost the demand for 3G networks in the South Asian subcontinent.

Related Link:
1. Bloomberg