Even before selling its shares in an initial public offering in February 2002, Bharti Airtel (then Bharti Televentures Ltd) had made public its displeasure in being measured by what is called Arpu, short for average revenue per user a month, a metric used by telecom analysts worldwide to value telecom shares. In India, the firm's senior executives repeatedly argued Arpu was bound to be low because of low purchasing power of the population and, instead, it was key to focus on minutes of usage, capacity utilization of the network, and profit margins.