NEW DELHI/MUMBAI: India’s top mobile phone firm Bharti Airtel said it will award call centre contracts for its African operations to IBM, Tech Mahindra and Spanco, marking the second significant step in replicating its hugely-successful outsourcing model in that continent. Bharti Airtel’s international CEO Manoj Kohli and other officials with the world’s fifth-largest telco by customers declined to divulge the deal size, but an industry executive with direct knowledge of the development said the five-year contract was worth around $500 million, with IBM and Spanco sharing most of the spoils.

The largest market of Nigeria is also split between these two vendors. “Both have approximately $200 million each, while Tech Mahindra has about $100 million,” this executive said, requesting anonymity. The contract for customer services is the first of its kind in Africa where the back-office processing industry is still in the early stages of evolution.

Last month, Bharti Airtel took the first step to exporting its business model to Africa by awarding a $1.5-billion contract to IBM for managing its IT requirements across 16 countries in the continent. Outsourcing of all key operational functions, a concept pioneered by Bharti Airtel, is the key to the telco’s low-cost high-volume business model that enabled it to build a subscriber base of around 150 million customers in India. Replicating this model in Africa will be the key to the profitability of Bharti’s loss-making African operations, which it bought from Kuwaiti telco Zain in a $10.7-billion deal earlier this year.