Bharti Airtel

Bharti Airtel reported consolidated revenues of ₹45,130 crores for Q3 FY25. India revenue, excluding Indus Towers, showed a strong sequential growth of 4.8%, reaching over ₹33,000 crores. EBITDA margins improved by 1.4% to 56.2%, reflecting operational efficiencies. The company also introduced EBITDAaL as a key metric, reporting it at ₹16,306 crores with a margin of 49.3%, and generated ₹9,440 crores in operating free cash flow.

The company emphasized its ESG commitment, highlighting network investments that have connected over 89,000 villages through 43,000 new sites in the last two years. Efforts to lower carbon footprint include solarization of over 3,300 sites in the quarter and 28,000 sites in the last six quarters, alongside AI deployment to optimize network energy consumption. The Airtel Foundation continues its social impact through education, reaching over 3 million children and 2 lakh teachers.

The mobile segment added 4.9 million customers, including 6.5 million smartphone users, with ARPU rising to ₹245. The broadband segment saw significant growth, adding 674,000 customers and expanding fiber home passes by 1.9 million, reaching a total of 35 million. Airtel Business reported revenues of just under ₹5,650 crores, an 8.7% YoY growth. Digital businesses, including Payments Bank, showed robust growth, with annualized revenue run rate of ₹2,800 crores (up 50% YoY) and deposits of ₹3,300 crores (up 42% YoY).

Capex for the quarter was ₹6,860 crores, primarily directed towards transport investments, homes, and B2B. The company rolled out 5,214 network sites and 13,950 route kilometers of fiber. Bharti Airtel demonstrated strong financial prudence by prepaying DoT spectrum dues from 2016, clearing all dues prior to 2021 auctions, and prepaying over ₹35,500 crores of high-cost spectrum dues in the last six quarters. This has improved the net debt to EBITDAaL ratio to 1.8x from 2.5x a year ago.

Bharti Airtel is restructuring its B2B portfolio, planning to exit the low-margin wholesale commodity voice and messaging business, which is expected to impact topline in the coming quarters but not EBITDA. The company is accelerating investments in digital adjacencies like Cloud, Security, IoT, and CPaaS, which account for nearly 90% of incremental industry growth. A comprehensive cloud solution is planned for launch in the coming months.

The company is focused on expanding its home broadband market, which is projected to double from 45 million to 80-90 million homes. FWA (Fixed Wireless Access) coverage has expanded to over 2,000 cities, with 1.9 million quarterly fiber home pass additions. Airtel is enhancing its value proposition through content partnerships (ZEE5, Glance) and improving customer onboarding with digital tools and activating its mass retail channel and delivery engineers.

5G is identified as a primary driver for data monetization, with customers upgrading to 2GB+ data packs. This is achieved through higher-end plans offering unlimited 5G data and lower-end plans where data allowances run out, prompting additional pack sales. The company continues to see ARPU improvement driven by feature phone to smartphone upgrades, prepaid to postpaid migrations, data monetization, and international roaming, despite India's ARPU remaining the lowest globally.

Bharti Airtel plans to transfer approximately 16,100 telecom towers (12,700 from Bharti Airtel and 3,400 from Bharti Hexacom) to Indus Towers. This strategic move is aimed at freeing up management bandwidth, creating greater operational efficiency and scale, and ultimately enhancing long-term value at Indus Towers, which is considered better equipped to manage this business.