If Sunil Mittal does not succeed...

He's been looking for a toehold in the global markets for over a year.

So, a few weeks ago, when Bharti Airtel hit 100 million subscribers, Sunil Mittal told journalists that his colleague Akhil (Gupta, joint managing director) would focus on getting the next 100 million at home and he would concentrate on acquiring the next 100 million internationally.

With one unsuccessful attempt at acquiring a stake in South Africa's largest mobile services company MTN behind him in 2008 and several other failures elsewhere in Asia, the inclination was to regard the statement as an example of a businessman's overblown ambition. 

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Monday, May 25, showed why it's a mistake to underestimate the 51-year-old chairman and group CEO of Bharti Enterprises.

Far from being daunted by last year's high-profile failure, Bharti announced it had resumed talks for a merger with MTN, this time involving a prodigiously complex cash and share-swap deal that has put analysts and regulators on their mettle.

If the deal is successful, Bharti will acquire 49 per cent in MTN and the South African company and its shareholders will acquire 36 per cent in Bharti, India's largest mobile service provider.

Bharti is currently the world's seventh largest mobile service provider. Adding MTN will give his conglomerate 200 million subscribers, making it the largest mobile operator in the world after China Mobile and Vodafone.

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There are many ifs and buts to the complex deal. But Mittal cannot be faulted on persistence. If it goes through and succeeds, it will give Mittal a presence in 21 African markets, including some of the biggest on the continent.

Such success will be sweet, for he has in the past lost out in bids to acquire telecom licences in Kenya, Iran, the Seychelles and Saudi Arabia, but managed to start mobile services in Sri Lanka.

On last year's aborted MTN deal, Mittal told Business Standard  then that the South African major basically went back on an agreement under which it would merge with Bharti. Instead, it offered a complex new offer for Bharti to merge with MTN, which Mittal found unacceptable.

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Luck has probably favoured Mittal since subsequent talks between MTN and Anil Ambani-controlled Reliance Communication foundered on opposition from estranged brother Mukesh Ambani's involving the terms of a family settlement.

Earlier, talks with Vodafone also failed on regulatory issues (MTN, in fact, has acquired the nickname 'runaway bride' -- after the movie starring Julia Roberts -- for wooing suitors and dumping them).

This time, Mittal appears to have done his homework more thoroughly. Instead of an outright merger in the first stage, he has worked out details of the equity that the two companies will acquire in each other, the better to ease their way through possible regulatory hurdles.

Even detractors think this is pretty much a done deal, regulations willing.

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Analysts feel that he may be getting MTN on the cheap, which means he has negotiated well; certainly, he is paying less than what he would have paid a year ago.

Mittal is not just good at deal-making, he is also innovative -- having pioneered the concept of separating the telecom service business from the hardware side and from the back-end work (the latter having been outsourced to IBM).

This has been at the heart of Bharti's low-cost telecom model, which others now strive to copy.

Mittal is also smart enough to know when to fight, and when to compromise. He and the other GSM mobile companies fought a fierce battle to prevent what they saw as backdoor entry into the mobile phone business by Reliance.

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When the government finally decided to relax the restrictions on CDMA players by allowing them to pay a licence fee equivalent to what GSM players paid plus a fine, Mittal understood the futility of further opposition and promptly agreed.

As the largest private mobile service provider by then, he could afford such generosity of spirit.

He cut short a holiday in December 2003 to fly back to Delhi and convince all the other GSM operators to accept the solution and withdraw court cases.  Most of the GSM operators had no choice but to say yes, though privately many of them wanted to continue the battle.

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Mittal has also played a key role in pushing for the auctioning of third-generation licences, although some of his competitors are in no hurry to see the introduction of this high-speed mobile service that could be a game-changer in the telecom market.

While questions have been asked about whether the MTN deal passes the test of the various regulatory requirements, Mittal himself has no doubts.

The way the deal has been structured makes it the first major foreign investment proposal under the new rules governing foreign direct investment, which does not count indirect holding when computing the FDI in a company (limited to 74 per cent for telecom); indeed, the deal may be a direct result of the relaxation of FDI rules a couple of months ago -- which means that Mittal has moved quickly.

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The success of his retailing venture, though a tie-up with Wal-Mart, the world's largest company, also hinges on a careful reading of the rules on foreign investment in retailing. Foreign investment is banned in single-brand retailing, but the Bharti-WalMart venture is for back-end systems that are outside the purview of this restriction.

Another of Mittal's strengths is that he has managed to carry a diverse bunch of partners with him. Having traversed a considerable distance from a 25-employee cycle-crankshaft factory that he set up in 1976 in Ludhiana, Mittal has learnt how to keep his partners humming along.

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In his telecom venture, for instance, Mittal has bought in SingTel, British Telecom, Telecom Italia, Warburg Pincus and Vodafone -- all of whom have invested in the company some time or the other.

SingTel is still there. And Vodafone also is still there despite the UK company buying into Hutchison-Essar (now Vodafone-Essar).

Outside of telecom, Mittal might have been unhappy at the way Changi Airport walked out of its partnership just a few days before bids for the Delhi airport privatisation project opened, but he said so publicly.

His ambition to become a key player in the BPO space also did not take off. The group had a joint venture with US-based BPO TeleTech but eventually sold the company.

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So will Mittal be second time lucky in the case of MTN?

"At the end of the day, it is all about logic. Either we make our point and convince you, or you make us see your logic," said Mittal in an interview to Business Standard a few months ago.

"There is no other secret," he added, "We stay on the straight and narrow. Many of my industry friends take so many short cuts. I wonder why they do it."

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