Bharti to invest Rs 100cr annually in TN market

To up advertising & promotion spend to Rs 30 crore for Tamil Nadu market

Bharti Televentures, which unified all its services under its flagship brand Airtel on Wednesday, has plans to invest Rs 100 crore annually in the Tamil Nadu market.

"We have invested about Rs 320 crore in Tamil Nadu till March 2006 and plan to expand our fixed landline services from the present seven cities to 11, by the end of this fiscal," K Krishnan, CEO and director (Tamil Nadu and Karnataka)of Bharti Infotel Limited, said.

Bharti has a fixed landline services presence in Chennai, Pondicherry, Coimbatore, Madurai, Vellore, Hosur and Tirupur.

Bharti also has plans for a 10-fold increase on advertising and promotion spend to Rs 30 crore for the Tamil Nadu market. It has recently started a customer contact centre for its fixed landline customers for enquiries related to billing and services.

Post the unified branding strategy, Bharti has increased the number of its customer connect points to 30 in Chennai alone. "We currently have two lakh fixed landline subscribers. This figure should increase by 25 per cent to 2.5 lakh by the end of this fiscal," added Krishnan.

Bharti expects to double its mobile subscriber base from eight lakh to 16 lakh by the end of this fiscal.