Bharti, RCom among world's top 10 telcos

Indian telecommunications companies are ringing louder. Bharti Airtel and Reliance Communications are in the big league of gloal telecom companies.

Bharti Airtel is set to be the 5th among the top telecom operators in the world, according to Wireless Intelligence. In the tenth spot is Reliance Communications.

Meanwhile, Idea Cellular, Tata Teleservices and BSNL have been ranked among the world's top 25 telecom companies. Idea Cellular is at 21st position, followed by Tata Teleservices at 22nd and BSNL has bagged the 23rd position.

(The latest global rankings are based on fourth-quarter 2009 connections data and are calculated on a proforma basis.)

Check out the world's top 10 telecom operators...

1. China Mobile  

The world's top telecom company, China Mobile Communications Corporation was established on April 20, 2000. It has a registered capital of 51.8 billion RMB yuan and assets of over 400 billion RMB yuan.

It fully holds the equity of China Mobile (HK) Group Limited. Currently, in terms of its market value, China Mobile Limited is the largest among all the overseas listed Chinese companies and among all the telecom carriers in Asia. It has a total number of 525 million subscribers.

2. Vodafone Group

From a United Kingdom start-up company in 1984, Vodafone is now the world's second largest telecommunications company.

It operates in Europe, the Middle East, Africa, Asia Pacific and the United States through the Company's subsidiary undertakings, joint ventures, associated undertakings and investments.

The Company had a total market capitalisation of approximately 71.2 billion as of November 2009. It has a total number of 309 million subscribers.

3. Telefonica

Telefonica is one of the world's largest telecommunications companies by market cap. Its activities are centred mainly on the fixed and mobile telephony and broadband business.

It operates in 25 countries and its customer base stands at 202 million. The group stands in third position in the telecom sector worldwide in terms of market capitalisation, first as an European integrated operator and also the third in the Eurostoxx 50 ranking as of December 31 2009.

4. America Movil Group

America Movil is a holding company forming the fourth largest mobile network operator in terms of equity subscribers.
A Fortune 500 company, it is a venture of the world's richest man, Carlos Slim Helu, America Movil provides services to over 186 million subscribers. Its Mexican subsidiary Telcel is the largest mobile operator in Mexico, commanding a market share in excess of 70 per cent.

5. Bharti Airtel

Bharti is now the world's third-largest, single-country mobile operator. In March, Bharti signed a an agreement with Zain Group to acquire Zain Africa BV based on an enterprise valuation of $10.7 billion. Bharti will acquire Zain's African mobile services operations in 15 countries with a total customer base of over 42 million. 

Zain is the market leader in ten of these countries and ranks second in four countries.  With this acquisition, Bharti Airtel will be the world's fifth largest wireless company with operations across 18 countries.

Bharti group's global telecom footprint will expand to 21 countries along with the operations in Seychelles, Jersey, and Guernsey. Bharti launched mobile services in India in 1995, Sri Lanka in 2009 and acquired Warid in Bangladesh in January 2010.

Bharti Airtel has been ranked among the six best performing technology companies in the world by BusinessWeek.

6. China Unicom

China Unicom (Hong Kong) Limited was incorporated in Hong Kong in February 2000 and was listed on the New York Stock Exchange and the Stock Exchange of Hong Kong on June 21, 2000 and June 22, 2000, respectively.

On June 1, 2001, the company was included as a constituent stock of the Hang Seng Index. The company merged with China Netcom Group Corporation (Hong Kong) Limited on October 15, 2008.

The company offers GSM and WCDMA cellular business in 31 provinces, municipalities and autonomous regions in China. It has a subscriber base of 147 million.

7. Deutsche Telekom Group

Deutsche Telekom AG is a German telecom giant headquartered in Bonn, Germany. It is the largest telecommunications company in Europe.

Deutsche Telekom was formed in 1996 as the former state-owned monopoly Deutsche Bundespost was privatized.

Deutsche Telekom is one of the world's leading integrated telecommunications companies with over 101 million subscribers spread across 50 countries.

The Group provides products and services for the fixed network, mobile communications, the Internet and IPTV for consumers, and ICT solutions for business customers and corporate customers.

8. Telenor Group

The Telenor Group has a strong footprint in Central and Eastern Europe and Asia and a leading Nordic position in mobile, broadband and TV services.

Telenor has grown from a national telephone service company in Norway to become one of the world's largest mobile provider in less than two decades.

At the time of its initial public offering in 2000, Telenor had a mobile subscriber base of 15 million. Today, it has 101 million subscribers.

9. Sistema Group

Russian telecom giant Sistema has about 100 million subscribers. Sistema is the largest public diversified financial corporation in Russia and the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS).

Founded in 1993, the company has total assets of $ 42.0 billion as of September 30, 2009. The Sistema Group which owns 52.8 per cent in of MTS Group has taken over an additional 97 million subscribers.

10. Reliance Communications

Reliance Communications, a part of the ADAG group, is one of the largest private sector information and communications company, with over 94 million subscribers.

It has established a pan-India, high-capacity, integrated (wireless and wireline), convergent (voice, data and video) digital network.

The Reliance Anil Dhirubhai Ambani Group currently has a net worth in excess of Rs 64,000 crore ($13.6 billion), cash flows of Rs 13,000 crore ($2.8 billion), net profit of Rs 8,400 crore ($1.8 billion).