{"id":994497,"date":"2026-02-25T09:50:27","date_gmt":"2026-02-25T04:20:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/telecomlive.in\/web\/?p=994497"},"modified":"2026-02-25T09:59:08","modified_gmt":"2026-02-25T04:29:08","slug":"from-minute-factory-to-money-factory-airtels-2-2-billion-bet","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/telecomlive.in\/web\/2026\/02\/25\/from-minute-factory-to-money-factory-airtels-2-2-billion-bet\/","title":{"rendered":"From minute factory to money factory: Airtel&#8217;s $2.2 billion bet"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Nearly 25 years ago, Bharti Airtel transformed India\u2019s telecom landscape by pioneering what was famously dubbed the \u201cminute factory\u201d model. By aggressively driving down call tariffs, outsourcing network management and IT functions and focusing on scale, Airtel made mobile telephony affordable to the masses. The strategy was to sell &#8216;minutes&#8217; cheaply, sell them in huge volumes and build a pan-India footprint faster than rivals. A decade later, it was selling minutes as well as data. <\/p>\n<p>Today, Airtel is attempting a structural turn from minute and data factory to money factory by ramping up its financial services business. The company plans to infuse Rs 20,000 crore, or roughly $2.2 billion, into its newly incorporated non-banking financial company (NBFC), Airtel Money.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Nearly 25 years ago, Bharti Airtel transformed India\u2019s telecom landscape by pioneering what was famously dubbed the \u201cminute factory\u201d model. By aggressively driving down call tariffs, outsourcing network management and IT functions and focusing on scale, Airtel made mobile telephony affordable to the masses. The strategy was to sell &#8216;minutes&#8217; cheaply, sell them in huge volumes and build a pan-India footprint faster than rivals. A decade later, it was selling minutes as well as data. Today, Airtel is attempting a structural turn from minute and data factory to money factory by ramping up its financial services business. The company plans [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,60,10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-994497","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-newspapers","category-telecom-the-economic-times","category-the-economic-times"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/telecomlive.in\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/994497","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/telecomlive.in\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/telecomlive.in\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/telecomlive.in\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/telecomlive.in\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=994497"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/telecomlive.in\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/994497\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/telecomlive.in\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=994497"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/telecomlive.in\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=994497"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/telecomlive.in\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=994497"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}