Bharti Airtel Ltd has appointed Sharat Sinha as the CEO of its enterprise arm, Airtel Business, effective June 3, the company said in a statement on Monday.
Sinha will report to Gopal Vittal, CEO of Bharti Airtel, and will join the Airtel management board, the statement said.
Sinha joins Airtel Business from Checkpoint Software Technologies, where he was president of Asia Pacific.
He has also held leadership roles at Palo Alto Networks, Cisco and VMWare, and has early career experience at Ericsson and VSNL.
"Sharat’s extensive global experience in product management and business leadership across various technology companies will provide significant momentum to Airtel’s growth ambitions in connectivity and adjacent areas," Vittal said.
The appointment comes after the exit of Ajay Chitkara, former CEO of Airtel Business, in June last year.
Following Chitkara’s departure, Airtel restructured its enterprise division into three segments: global business, led by Vani Venkatesh; domestic business, led by Ganesh Lakshminarayanan; and Nxtra Data Centers, led by Ashish Arora.
Equipment theft
Telecom service providers (TSPs) in India are facing an alarming rise in thefts of critical equipment, causing service disruptions and significant financial losses.
Since October 2023, incidents of theft, particularly of remote radio units (RRUs) and baseband units (BBUs), have reached unprecedented levels.
S.P. Kochhar, director-general of the Cellular Operators Association of India (COAI), has appealed to the department of telecommunications (DoT) for intervention.
In his letter, he emphasised the growing severity of these thefts, which have particularly impacted Delhi NCR, Rajasthan, Punjab and Haryana in the north and Assam in the east.
Thefts are high in Andhra Pradesh, Telangana, Tamil Nadu and Karnataka in the south. Notably, 31 districts in these regions account for 50 per cent of the reported incidents.
Despite preventive measures, TSPs have struggled to curb these thefts, which often go unrecovered, posing significant technical and legal challenges.
The frequency and boldness of the thefts have undermined service quality and led to complete outages in some areas. Additionally, replacing stolen equipment imposes a considerable financial burden on TSPs.
