BHARTI Airtel says Zain Zambia shareholders should hold on to their shares to allow the company to be listed on the Lusaka Stock Exchange (LuSE).

Company chairman Sunil Bharti Mittal yesterday said Bharti Airtel, the fifth world largest mobile telecommunications company, was eager to have its equity shares on LuSE.

“We are not seeking delisting, we would really want that our shareholders have confidence in our future plans on how we will develop this company and hopefully this company stays listed,” said Bharti during the Zain Zambia rebranding press briefing. “But we will see after this process whether it will continue to be listed in the form it is today or not. This will be in the hands of the shareholders, how they want to proceed on this one.”

Bharti said there would be no job losses in the company’s customer service department during the transition period.

“In the 16 countries we are in on the African continent, Airtel is operated by Africans. This is an article of faith for us, we have 6,500 on the roles of Zain which is Airtel now, 65 or less of those are from India,” he said. “That is a very small portion of people that have come from India, necessarily so, to transplant our low cost, low tariff and widespread model in Africa. We do not expect IBM Bharti’s IT partner to bring in experts from the United States or Tech-Mahindra IT, web development offshore company which is setting up a call centre facility in Zambia to bring people from India.”

However, Bharti observed that the company would have difficulty in its expansion programme due to limited infrastructure in the country.

“We are committed to rollout our products in every part of the country although, as I have seen, infrastructure will be a challenge, but Airtel will make Zambia proud,” said Bharti.

Zain Zambia is now officially called Airtel.