We found Bharti Airtel's reasoning to not offer bundled services clubbing its wireline, wireless and DTH offerings a bit surprising. The Management indicated that the reason to not offer bundled services is the disparate IT systems of the three businesses. This surprised us, coming from the leading telecom company in India.
If the market is ready for bundled services, such system aspects cannot be a reason to not pursue it aggressively. There is a new large player on the horizon who intends to pursue bundled offerings aggressively, if the media reports are to be believed. The new player starts with fresh IT systems and we do believe that Bharti would not want to risk losing business on account of inferior IT systems. We may be stretching our argument here a bit but as we said earlier, Airtel's (honest, we appreciate) response surprised us.
