Bharti Airtel chief information officer Pradipt Kapoor confirmed the plan and told PTI that Airtel is rapidly scaling up its in-house digital talent pool to support its transformation into a digital telco.
Kapoor said, "Pune being an established IT and tech hub, makes it an obvious choice for Airtel to tap into the talent pool and also drive cross-industry collaboration."
A senior company official told the news agency that Airtel will initially hire 500 digital engineering professionals for the upcoming facility. It is planning to hire across multiple experience and domains such as Big Data, Machine Learning, Dev Ops, Tech Ops, etc.
The official revealed that apart from hiring from top global talent including Silicon Valley and domestic start-ups, Airtel is also looking to hire from engineering institutes like IITs, NITS, and IIITs for its digital technology hubs.
Such would be the company's fourth digital technology hub in the country and the first one in the western region. These hubs support Airtel's strategy to pivot into a digital services company, especially with 5G services on the horizon.
The company already has similar digital technology hubs in Gurgaon, Bengaluru (Airtel X-Labs), and Noida harbouring about 3,000 employees.
Currently, the company's digital assets comprise the Airtel Thanks app, Wynk Music app, and Airtel Xstream content platform having over 180 million monthly active users.
Airtel stated to have made investments aggregating more than $ 46 billion in the last couple of decades for creating a digital infrastructure that accounts for 40% of India's economic and digital activity.
Earlier this week, Sunil Bharti Mittal, chairman of Bharti Enterprises said, Bharti Airtel’s digital business stream will generate revenue of several billion dollars over the next few years and will give better multiples on valuation than telecom as the CAPEX needed will be lower than telecom.
In a CII event, Mittal said that Airtel was steadily generating value from digital assets of its own such as Wynk Music and Airtel Thanks besides building new business streams of advertising, cybersecurity, cloud for SMEs, and communication platforms as a service (CPaaS) on the back of partnerships with companies that specialise in the segments.
"Our digital revenues should start to become meaningful in their own right in several billion dollars over the next few years, and thankfully, the valuations of the multiples that one generates in the digital business - because the CAPEX is low - is significantly better than telecom, which is a very solid business but a capital guzzling and spectrum guzzling business every year. (This) will be a good combination to have the group,' Mittal spoke in the virtual event.
