Bharti Airtel Chairman Sunil Bharti Mittal’s African safari has entered a new phase. On October 9, Airtel Money made its debut on the London Stock Exchange, with the sale of 270 million existing shares raising approximately 529 million pounds in what was described as the exchange’s biggest listing in five years. The offer valued the mobile financial services business at around $7 billion.
For Mittal, whose Airtel empire entered Africa through telecommunications, the bigger prize may lie in turning millions of mobile subscribers into customers for a much wider financial services business.
