Bharti Airtel award upon Prysmian WUXI

Prysmian Wuxi Cable Company, the telecom production plant in China manufacturing optical and copper cables, has been honoured by one of its largest customers, Bharti Airtel, with their “ Partner of the Year” award for 2009. Out of 110 valued partners & suppliers to Bharti, Prysmian Wuxi was one of 10 chosen for the current year, and this is the first time in history the Indian Company has conferred this acknowledgement on a cable manufacturer. 

This award also reinforces the outstanding long term success had by Prysmian with its cable supply to Bharti Airtel: they also presented Prysmian with an "Award for Excellent Performance" during a visit to Milan in June 2007 by their senior management.
Moreover, in 2007 Prysmian was the major supplier of fibre optic cables of Bharti Airtel. This has been a truly international operation with the superior quality optical fibres coming from Prysmian’s worldwide centre of excellence at FOS (Battipaglia, Italy). From here the fibres were dispatched to the production unit at Wuxi where they were cabled and sent to India.

In order to underline how Wuxi achieved this award, we interviewed Steve Szymanski, the Commercial Director of the Telecom Division at Wuxi, who can say a great deal on this subject.

Steve, when did you start the cooperation with Barthi?
“In the last few years Prysmian Wuxi has developed diverse relationships with Bharti Airtel, including executive, general business, technical & field installation personnel. In 2007, and again 2008, we had a perfect supply record, no complaints of quality or late shipments”

And which premises is this founded on?
“We meet regularly with all levels of Bharti to discuss business challenges, technical trends, like FTTH, and issue affecting the field installation groups. We're seen as a true partner who offers advice to Bharti on product development and infrastructure solutions, together with experiences our other telecoms partners have encountered in the field. In other words, rather than solely providing a product, we're providing a valuable service that enables Bharti to plan projects and compete more effectively against their peer group, leading to improved financial results for them”

Bharti just acknowledged your great job: such an award is new upon a cable manufacturer, isn’t it?
“It is. In fact we achieved two important milestones recently with Bharti. The Supplier of the Year award was conferred upon Prysmian Wuxi and, as you said, represents the first time ever that a cabler has achieved this accolade. Typical recipients include IT brand names, such as IBM, Cisco, Ericsson, Microsoft, and the like. This year they added Prysmian Wuxi Cable Company to the listing of very important value added partner”

And the other excellent outcome was…
“The second milestone Prysmian Wuxi achieved is the recent signing of the new Bharti supply contract. This contract goes into effect shortly and we have achieved an 80% share of the total volumes, now becoming the sole foreign owned optical cable supplier to Bharti (the remaining 20% share remains a set aside for Indian manufacturers)”

What do you think is the key of your success?
“I would like to point out that Prysmian Wuxi's success and accolades conferred by Bharti are a group effort. The support and resources that we draw from Prysmian Corporate in marketing, sector logistics and engineering are crucial to our success. Further, the support and resources provided by FOS must also be recognized. This indeed has been a group effort and credit must be spread throughout the group”