Airtel national asset that needs to be nurtured: Mittal

MUMBAI: With Union finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman on stage, Bharti Airtel founder-chairman and ET Business Leader of the Year Sunil Mittal, in an impassioned acceptance speech, called the telecom giant a “national asset that needs to be nurtured”.

In response to an earlier remark by banker Uday Kotak about consolidation in telecom, which saw the number of players shrink from 13 to 3, Mittal said, “In our case, there was no consolidation. There was only annihilation, company after company disappeared. ”