New Delhi, June 30 (IANS): Bharti Airtel on Tuesday said it has become the third-largest mobile operator in the world in terms of subscribers.

As per the latest data published by World Cellular Information Service, Bharti Airtel, with over 303 million mobile subscribers across its operations, has moved up one position in the global rankings.

China Mobile and Vodafone Group occupied the first and second positions respectively.

Bharti Airtel is a telecom service provider with operations in 20 countries across South Asia and Africa.

"This is a major landmark in the journey of Airtel and underlines the strength of our business model and our brand that is loved by customers across 20 countries," Sunil Bharti Mittal, chairman of Bharti Airtel, said.

"Today, we seamlessly manage global-scale operations in diverse geographies and deliver the same world-class services to each customer, this perhaps is one of our biggest achievements."

Bharti Airtel's mobile network covers over 1.85 billion people and carried over 1.23 trillion minutes of calls and over 333 petabytes of data in 2014-15.