Vodafone will flesh out details to its shareholders today of a joint venture that will help it to cut the costs of rolling out its business in India.

The mobile group, which seized control of Hutchison Essar, India’s fourth-biggest operator, this year, has pooled assets such as towers, cooling systems and power supplies with its rivals Bharti Airtel and Idea Cellular in a deal announced over the weekend.

Private equity groups keen to add such infrastructure to their assets could join the consortium. Sunil Bharti Mittal, the chairman and chief executive of Bharti Enterprises, which controls Bharti Airtel, said that he was in talks with a “clutch of private equity investors” about them taking a stake in the venture.

The new company, Indus Towers, is likely to be floated within the next couple of years. Vodafone Essar and Bharti will own 42 per cent each of the venture, while Idea will own the remaining 16 per cent.

Vodafone’s acquisition of a 67 per cent stake in Hutchison Essar, now renamed Vodafone Essar, was its biggest since its record £101 billion purchase of Mannesmann, of Germany, in 2000. Along with net debt of $2 billion, the deal valued the entire Indian group at $18.8 billion (£9.2 billion).

With its 1.1 billion population, India is a prime target for mobile companies struggling with slowing growth in their traditional markets in the West. Mobile penetration on the sub-continent is expected to rise considerably from its present level of 13 per cent.

However, the amount spent by the average customer is low, at about $8 a month, and vast areas of the country have yet to be covered by a mobile network.

As part of efforts to squeeze value from the deal, Vodafone Essar, which has 37.2 million customers, previously had signed a memorandum of understanding with Bharti Airtel to explore ways of cutting costs and hastening the expansion of its network, especially in rural areas. However, at the group’s results announcement in November, Arun Sarin, Vodafone’s chief executive, hinted that his plans had become more ambitious. “As we’ve gotten into it, we are finding that we have been able to expand the scope and scale of the venture that we were thinking about,” he said.

Investors will grill Vodafone about the potential savings that could result from the alliance at a special presentation on the Indian business in London today. Mr Sarin so far has said only that savings from such a venture could be “quite significant.” Vodafone has said already that it plans to spend around $2 billion this year in developing its network in India.

Vodafone has embarked on infrastructure sharing plans in Britain and Spain.

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