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Bharti Airtel Ltd. — Call Transcript 2026
May 20, 2026
61225_rns_2026-05-20_0d8bb48f-597c-443d-8365-96706899b960.pdf
Call Transcript
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bharti
May 20, 2026
National Stock Exchange of India Limited
Exchange Plaza, C-1 Block G
Bandra Kurla Complex, Bandra (E)
Mumbai - 400051, India
Symbol: BHARTIARTL/AIRTELPP
BSE Limited
Phiroze Jeejeebhoy Towers
Dalal Street, Mumbai - 400001, India
Scrip Code: 532454/890157
Sub: Transcript of the Earnings Call dated May 14, 2026
Dear Sir/ Ma'am,
Pursuant to Regulation 30 of the SEBI (Listing Obligations and Disclosure Requirements) Regulations, 2015, we are enclosing herewith the transcript of the Earnings Call held on May 14, 2026 in respect of the audited financial results of the Company for the fourth quarter (Q4) and year ended March 31, 2026.
The transcript of the call is also uploaded on the Company's website i.e. https://www.airtel.in/about-bharti/equity/results
Kindly take the same on record.
Thanking you,
Sincerely yours,
For Bharti Airtel Limited
Rohit
Krishan
Puri
Digitally signed by
Rohit Krishan Puri
Date: 2026.05.20
20:00:10 +05'30'
Rohit Krishan Puri
Company Secretary & Compliance Officer
Encl.: As above
Bharti Airtel Limited
(a Bharti Enterprise)
Regd. Office: Airtel Center, Plot No. 16, Udyog Vihar, Phase-IV, Gurugram - 122015, India
Corporate Office: Bharti Crescent, 1, Nelson Mandela Road, Vasant Kunj, Phase II, New Delhi - 110070, India
T.: +91-124-4222222, F.: +91-124-4248063, Email: [email protected], Website: www.airtel.in
CIN: L74899HR1995PLC095967
Final Transcript
Transcript of Bharti Airtel Limited and Bharti Hexacom Limited Q4 ended March 31, 2026 Earnings Webinar
Conference Call Transcript
Event: Transcript of Bharti Airtel Limited and Bharti Hexacom Limited 4Q ended March 31, 2026 Earnings Webinar
Event Date/Time: May 14, 2026/12:00Hrs
Republished with permission. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means without the prior written consent of Bharti Airtel Limited.
Final Transcript
Transcript of Bharti Airtel Limited and Bharti Hexacom Limited Q4 ended March 31, 2026 Earnings Webinar
CORPORATE PARTICIPANTS
Mr. Sunil Bharti Mittal
Chairman, Bharti Airtel Limited
Mr. Gopal Vittal
Executive Vice Chairman, Bharti Airtel Limited
Mr. Shashwat Sharma
Managing Director and Chief Executive Officer (Airtel India), Bharti Airtel Limited
Mr. Soumen Ray
Group Chief Financial Officer, Bharti Airtel Limited and Director, Bharti Hexacom Limited
Mr. Akhil Garg
Chief Financial Officer (Airtel India), Bharti Airtel Limited
Mr. Naval Seth
Head of Investor Relations, Bharti Airtel Limited and Bharti Hexacom Limited
Mr. Karthikeyan Velu
Group Financial Controller, Bharti Airtel Limited and Chief Financial Officer, Bharti Hexacom Limited
Vaidehi Sharma – Moderator
Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. I am Vaidehi Sharma, the moderator for this webinar. Welcome to the Bharti Airtel Limited and Bharti Hexacom Limited Q4 ended March 31, 2026 Earnings Webinar. Present with us today, is the senior leadership team of Bharti Airtel and Bharti Hexacom Limited. I must remind you that the overview and discussions today may include certain forward-looking statements that must be viewed in conjunction with the risks that we face. Post the management opening remarks, we will open up for an interactive Q&A session. Interested participants may click on raise hand option on the Zoom application to join the Q&A queue. The participants may click this option during the management opening remarks itself to ensure they find a place in the queue. Upon announcement of name, participants to kindly click on unmute myself in the pop-up screen and start asking the question post introduction. With this, I would like to hand over to Mr. Soumen Ray for his opening remarks.
Soumen Ray – Group Chief Financial Officer, Bharti Airtel Limited and Director, Bharti Hexacom Limited
Thank you, Vaidehi. Welcome to the Q4 FY2026 earnings call of Bharti Airtel Limited. I have with me: Gopal, Shashwat, Akhil and Naval. I am pleased to inform you that today, we will have Mr. Sunil Bharti Mittal, Chairman, Bharti Airtel Limited, joining us for the last 10 to 15 minutes of the webinar to address queries relating to promoter shareholding. I will now start with an update on our consolidated financials for the Q4 and full year ended FY2026, post which I will hand over to Shashwat to talk about our India business including the strategic priorities.
First, a quick roundup on FY2026. We delivered another year of strong performance. Our consolidated revenue crossed another milestone and came in at a lifetime high of about Rs.2,11,000 Crores backed by strong performance in both India and Africa. EBITDAaL came in at about Rs.1,08,000 Crores with a margin of 51.2%. India EBITDAaL excluding passive, came in at about Rs.72,500 Crores, growing around 18% and delivered a 3.1% improvement and stood at 51.7%. Our sustained operational excellence is underpinned by our portfolio premiumization, sharp execution and tight control over cost through war on waste initiatives. Capex for FY2026 for India excluding passive was around Rs.31,000 Crores. Operating free cash flow, which is EBITDAaL minus capex was a solid Rs.41,500 Crores plus. Disciplined capital spending and operational excellence continue to strengthen our balance sheet. Net debt to EBITDAaL now stands at 1.1. The Board recommended a dividend of Rs.24 per share, a significant increase over last year's Rs.16 per share. This is in line with our stated philosophy of progressive increase in payouts.
Let me now turn to our Q4 performance. Consolidated revenues came in at about Rs.55,400 Crores, a growth of 2.6% sequentially. Africa maintained its underlying growth trajectory. Q4 constant currency revenue growth was at 1.1% and was impacted by seasonality as well as lesser number of days. Currency tailwinds further supported growth in reported currency. India revenues excluding passive came in at about Rs.36,100 Crores. EBITDAaL margins came in at about 52%, an improvement of 20 basis points.
Let me now talk about the strength of our diversified portfolio and an update on our new growth bets. Our diversified and resilient portfolio continues to play well. Underlying performance across India and Africa was strong. Africa now accounts for 29% of revenues. India mobile- 52%, India non-mobile at 13% and Indus at 6%. Our investments are directed towards future proofing Airtel by building world class digital network, sharpening the core portfolio and scaling new digital growth engines.
Our strategy to further diversify our portfolio is reflected through investments in new growth bets. Let me spend a few minutes on the same. Over the year, through a very disciplined approach, we have identified new areas, which we call adjacencies and operated calibrated experimentation on them. To us, adjacencies means the business must pass two filters: first, we have a proven right to
Republished with permission. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means without the prior written consent of Bharti Airtel Limited.
Transcript of Bharti Airtel Limited and Bharti Hexacom Limited Q4 ended March 31, 2026 Earnings Webinar
win and second, we can create a differentiated value proposition. We have sharpened our focus basis the result of the experimentation in three specific adjacencies: these are data centers, financial services and Airtel cloud.
In data centers, we continue to make steady progress against our ambition of building 1 gigawatt capacity over the next few years. To augment this journey, Nxtra announced a $1 billion fund raise for marquee investors alongside participation from Airtel. We see this as a strong validation of both the scale of the opportunity and our execution capabilities in this business.
In financial services, we reached an important milestone, with our subsidiary Airtel Money Limited receiving the Reserve Bank of India's approval to operate as a non-deposit taking non-banking financial company. We are now progressing towards commercial launch. Over the last three years, we have built a strong foundation as a loan service provider, serving customers' needs through digital first solutions. Our loan service provider business continues to deliver strong growth, with monthly loan disbursement run rate now over Rs.550 Crores. What gives us confidence here is the combination of our digital platform, data and analytics capabilities and strong operating discipline. Together, these position us well to expand access to simple, secure and innovative financial services at scale. Within our financial service portfolio, Airtel Payments Bank delivered another quarter of strong performance. It ended Q4 with monthly transacting users of about 120 million. Annualized revenue run rate is now about Rs.3400 Crores, growing 23% Y-o-Y. Deposit remains strong at over Rs.4600 Crores growing at 27% Y-o-Y.
In Airtel Cloud, our telco-grade sovereign cloud offering is seeing encouraging traction. We ended the year with securing 24 deals, followed by further wins in April and we are currently in conversation with multiple customers across industries. We have also made very good progress in building attributes and credentials required by our customers in this business. In these new growth bets, we are still in early days but we are encouraged by the progress, confident in the opportunities ahead and committed to building these businesses with the same discipline, customer centricity and long-term focus that have shaped Airtel's journey so far.
Now, an update on group synergies. We are working on various areas including technology, network, supply chain and talent across the group. Initial outcomes are extremely encouraging and moving as per our plan. Our tech stack has already been extended to Africa, Payments Bank and Indus Towers at arm's-length pricing. This gives significant leverage across the group to shorten the learning curve, drive cost effectiveness and accelerate digital ways of working to drive growth. In addition, we have taken B2B and homes as two areas for massive synergy. Within this, we are working towards significantly reducing dependence of diesel by transitioning towards high powered batteries and renewable power. We strongly believe that work across these areas will provide meaningful outcomes with superior revenue growth and cost efficiencies.
Moving to the material transaction that was approved by the Board to acquire additional stake in our Africa operations. The Board yesterday approved a share swap transaction between Airtel and ICIL to acquire additional 16.3% in Airtel Africa. We continue to remain confident about the long-term growth opportunity in Africa led by the low tele-density at about 45% on unique SIMs, smartphone penetrations of only about 52%, very low data consumption per customer and overall young demographic profile of the market. Further, there are two large growth opportunities, the first one being homes, enterprise and data centers and the second being Airtel Money where there is a potential for further value unlock with listing. This is a no cash deal and value accretive to Airtel shareholders.
Before I hand over to Shashwat, I would also like to talk about the impact of the ongoing geopolitical crisis. There are a few areas of our operations, which are seeing impact including international roaming, capex on account of INR depreciation, restriction on gas supply affecting galvanizing industry in turn leading to lower tower build-outs. The other obvious impact is energy price increase. Africa has already been impacted by it. Having said that, we are looking at all possible opportunities to mitigate the impact with amplified efforts through our war on waste initiatives. With this, I will now hand over to Shashwat for an update on India business.
Shashwat Sharma – Managing Director and Chief Executive Officer (Airtel India)
Thank you, Soumen. A very good afternoon to everyone. I will start by sharing an update on our ESG plans followed by each of our business segments and then our strategic priorities.
Let me start with ESG. Our ESG progress is anchored in our strategy and in the way we leverage technology and digital innovation to drive sustainable operations with enhanced efficiency. A key focus area is increasing the use of energy from alternate to renewable sources. This is reflected in our continued expansion of solar power deployment across our network infrastructure. We ended the year with 42,000 network sites which have solar access. Over the last two years, we have solarized nearly 27,000 network sites. We also made significant progress on workforce diversity. Women contribute to over 20% of our workforce today, improving from 11% that we had in 2023. This is not enough and we believe that we must continue the work much more to improve our women representation in our workforce.
Moving on to a quick update on each of our businesses, and let me start first by rounding up the year gone by. We delivered strong performance across our businesses. Mobility sustained revenue market share gains to reach a lifetime high share. Homes accelerated strongly this year, adding 4.2 million customers, while B2B further strengthened its market share in core connectivity and delivered strong outcomes in its digital businesses. Our IPTV launch last year was well received, with encouraging customer adoption. We continue to invest in digital infrastructure, deploying nearly 7800 more network sites and rolling out nearly 43,000 km of fiber. Fiber deployment remains a strategic priority for us and I will come back to this shortly. Underpinning this, our digital first approach and relentless focus on serving customers better every day. FY2026 was a landmark year for us. We continue to deliver strong performance and seeded three new digital growth engines that we believe will drive the long-term growth of the Company.
Let me now turn to the quarterly performance of the business segments for Q4. Mobile, we added 4.7 million customers in Q4 and 5.8 million out of those were smartphone customers. Our ARPU for the quarter came in at Rs.257, which on an EDB basis was an increase of Rs.3 for the quarter. We are not happy with the ARPU increase of Rs.3, part of this issue was linked to West Asia crisis
Transcript of Bharti Airtel Limited and Bharti Hexacom Limited Q4 ended March 31, 2026 Earnings Webinar
and international roaming revenues, but we are now determined to doubling down on all our levers on ARPU and growing and accelerating the space.
Homes- we continue to deliver another strong quarter, our net ads came in at 1.1 million while FWA continued to expand the addressable market for us, we are deepening our footprint on FTTH with accelerated home pass expansion.
Digital TV saw a turnaround. We added nearly half a million customers during the quarter led by the IPTV adoption. Our IPTV take rates continue to improve and are delivering on our converged agenda on content.
Airtel Business revenue came in at about Rs.5,500 Crores, growing 2.6% sequentially. We ended the year on a strong note with a healthy order book and a funnel across domestic and global business with multiple wins from large enterprises. During the quarter, we secured multiple deals on IoT, security, cloud, core connectivity, and Nxtra and we ended the year with a strong order book growth of 17% in FY2026. Digital businesses delivered a strong revenue growth for us growing at 27% in FY2026. We continue to strengthen our offerings through strategic investments across our digital portfolio spanning cloud, cybersecurity, financial services, IoT, digital platforms and CPaaS. These investments are enabling us to build scalable enterprise grade digital capabilities and diversify our revenue mix.
Let me now move to our strategic pillars and start with quality customers. Starting with homes, I had mentioned earlier, we see a large opportunity with market potential of nearly 100 million connected homes over the medium-term in India. Growing smart TV penetration, evolving content consumption behavior of consumers and the growing need for reliable and secure home connectivity are driving a very strong demand well beyond key urban centers. Given the global environment, there has been challenge on this business with memory and chipset supply as well as prices. Given this scenario and the fact that fiber offers the superior experience and reliable connectivity to our customers, we have doubled down on all our efforts to grow our fiber business. In FY2026, we rolled out upwards of 8 million home passes to cross 45 million home passes and we continue to expand rapidly. Another area where we see growth is driving fixed and mobile convergence. We have seen converging Wi-Fi and mobile for our customers drops their churn by nearly 50%. We are determined to leveraging our existing relationships with high value customers and scale our converged base. We have taken a step in this direction through our recently launched One Airtel plans which offer customers': convenience, flexibility of bundling as well as great value.
Let me now switch to mobile. The focus on mobile is to dramatically accelerate our ARPU growth in the business. Overall upgrading with data consumption in 5G, handset upgrades from feature phones and international roaming offer large head room for growth. However, we see a very large opportunity in upgrading to postpaid and are determined to accelerating postpaid growth by driving differentiation. Our rural network expansion program continues and contributes significantly to our growth momentum.
Let me now turn to B2B. Majority of incremental growth for the industry in B2B is coming from adjacencies including cloud, security, IoT, CPaaS, data centers. Core connectivity growth is moderate and we continue to grow competitively. To capitalize on the growth opportunities, we are focusing on three key areas. First is to build a gold standard infrastructure with low latency flapless fiber networks, deeper subsea cables presence across the globe, augment DC to DC connectivity and expand our OPGW infrastructure. Over the last three years, we have deployed over 1,43,000 kilometers of fiber and we believe the pace of deployment should continue to address the growing customer needs across as well as in future proofing Airtel itself. The other area we need to strengthen is our digital portfolio capabilities while building a world-class delivery and assurance organization. We are developing comprehensive suite of digital services to deepen and sharpen our portfolio across cloud, IoT, cybersecurity, CPaaS and SD-WAN. We are strengthening our account management capabilities to deliver superior customer experience supported by digital tooling and data science platforms.
The second pillar of our strategy is the obsession to deliver brilliant experience. Delivering an exceptional experience to our customers remains paramount to us and underpins everything we do, from network investments to digital innovations. Our Converged Data Engine that powers digital experience layer is accelerating our ways of working and enabling deeper customer engagement through persuasion and contextual marketing. Our network priorities are towards building a gold-plated experience and we are investing in strengthening our transport layer and launching advanced capabilities on 5G. Our 5G network is now fully SA ready. FWA is running fully on SA while mobile customers are transitioning in a phased manner. We continue to refine our digital tools and depth of data science to improve our experience and reduce customer churn. Customer obsession is deeply embedded in our culture that we have built over the years and this is anchored in two core beliefs: ownership mindset and entrepreneurial spirit. Embodying this philosophy, we have established an annual tradition. Teams across the organization spend a day in the field with frontline colleagues, directly interacting with customers, listening to them, learning and grasping their pain points. Every year through this initiative, we gather critical insights across network customer journeys, delivery and assurance and many other areas. These insights help us resolve issues structurally and make our network more resilient and help us serve our customers better every day.
The third pillar of our strategy is to build and leverage our digital capabilities. AI is now central to our digital agenda and we are progressively embedding AI across our platform architecture. Let me give you some flavor of notable outcomes from AI last quarter. Our fight against spam has always been powered by AI at scale. In Q4, we identified an additional 14 billion spam calls and over 520 million spam messages. Our next best action AI model generated 135 million actions last quarter, which helps us accelerate our cross sell on Wi-Fi, postpaid and financial services. In Q4, we processed 375 million customer interactions with our voice AI bot and processed 256 million images using our vision AI for safety, design and workmanship. AI is contributing to nearly 30% of all code written at Airtel and this number is growing with every passing week. I want to emphasize that we are still in the early stages of our journey on AI, but we are beginning to see meaningful impact scaling up across businesses.
The last and fourth pillar of our strategy is war on waste. As there are cost headwinds on both opex and capex, I want to underscore that we have widened the funnel to identify and eliminate waste across the organization. While unpredictable scenarios are playing out globally, the cost pressures we are seeing today remain confined to a few specific areas: particularly in servers and memory prices as well as availability of these components. Significant steps to re-engineer and redesign are underway in the organization to mitigate these pressures. We have also taken significant steps to reduce our dependency on diesel consumption across our sites. These initiatives are beginning to deliver meaningful outcomes and we believe there is a lot of work still to be done in this space of war on waste.
To sum up, overall, we delivered another year and a quarter of strong performance underpinned by strength of our diversified portfolio and sharp execution. Looking ahead, we continue to see large growth opportunities across mobility led by ARPU growth through portfolio premiumization and postpaid, rapid expansion of homes and across B2B. At the same time, our investments are directed to building digital businesses and new growth bets at scale to future proof Airtel and its long-term growth. Digital acceleration remains at the core of our strategy with AI increasingly embedded across the businesses at scale. The strength of our balance sheet reflects our disciplined capital allocation, sustained deleveraging and operational excellence. This has enabled us to sustain a progressive dividend policy with our dividends in FY2026 increasing by 50% over the previous year. With that summary, let me now hand it over back to Vaidehi for the Q&A session.
Vaidehi Sharma – Moderator
Thank you very much, Shashwat. We will now begin the Bharti Airtel Q&A interactive session for all the participants. Please note that the Q&A session will be restricted to the analyst and investor community only. Due to time constraints, we would request if you could limit the questions to two per participants to enable more participation. Interested participants may click on raise hand option on the Zoom application to join the Q&A queue. Upon announcement of name, participants to kindly click on unmute myself in the pop-up screen and start asking the question post introduction. Participants are requested to limit their questions to Bharti Airtel till 01:00 p.m. as the management will start the Q&A discussion on Bharti Hexacom from 1:00 p.m. onwards. With this, the first question comes from Mr. Manish Adukia. Mr. Adukia, you may please unmute your side, introduce yourself and ask your question now.
Manish Adukia - Goldman Sachs
Good afternoon. Thank you for taking my questions. This is Manish Adukia from Goldman Sachs. My first question is on capital allocation and thank you for the color around dividend payout, now, the free cash flow you are generating in the India business last 12 months- more than $4 billion, consolidated business- more than $5 billion of free cash flow. In the context of that free cash flow, the dividend payout is still less than about 40% of that free cash flow generation plus for Africa you have done like a share swap transaction, so in the context of that large free cash generation over the next few years, one, how are you thinking about progressively, what payout may look like in a steady state and two, if you can just talk about what are the other priorities in terms of assets outside of India that you may potentially look to explore in the future given, just, the strong free cash flow generation and maybe the criteria you may look to assess any asset that you may want to acquire outside India? That would be my first question please.
Gopal Vittal – Executive Vice Chairman, Bharti Airtel Limited
Manish, let me take that. Obviously, the free cash flow generation for the Company has increased and that is the reason why we have sort of stepped up and also said to you in the past that there will be a progressive dividend policy, which is the reason that you have seen the step up in dividend. As far as capital allocation is concerned, I think the way we think about it is, the first and primary port of call is to really invest in the core business. This is the core business in India, the core business in Africa, the core business in Indus Towers, etc., and I think the climb in stake in Africa was predicated on that assumption of really picking up a greater stake in a very valuable asset where the penetration of data, tele-density, the penetration of smartphones is low, Airtel Money is a big opportunity, so we are very excited about that. The second port of call is, really, to continue to deleverage to the extent that we need to. The third port of call is to invest in some of these adjacencies, which Soumen spoke about. Data centers, you will note that despite the investments we have put in, we aren't a big player in the data center market. We are only at about 10% to 12% share and for a Company of our size, we are not satisfied with that kind of presence, so we really need to step up our game in data centers and our ambition is to get to a gigawatt as we mentioned in a few years' time but that game will not end there, we will continue to build out and the data center market has 50% to 60% of its demand coming out of Mumbai, so land will need to be acquired and data centers will need to be built. Second port of call is, really, around financial services and this is why we have announced our NBFC after the experiments that Soumen spoke about. Again, we are excited about it because we believe we have a genuine moat here, to really drive the business as a whole and create stickiness for our user base, in a market where the penetration of financial services and lending generally is very low and the headroom for growth over the next three decades is high. Obviously, it is a business that needs to be run prudently, collections are more important as many of you have told us in smaller conversations and we fully understand that but the power of our platform is showing us that the delinquencies as well as the collection cost as well as sales acquisition cost are much lower than if you do it alone in a very fragmented market. So, that is the second port of call. The third port of call is, really, around cloud and here again, we have not really started. We have got 25 deals as Soumen mentioned, these are small deals but we have just begun. We think this could be a large opportunity, especially in a new geopolitical context where a lot of workloads and when I speak to many companies, they tell me that a lot of workloads do need a sovereign requirement. We are fully sovereign, we are controlled by an Indian entity, so, the control plane, the data plane, the
jurisdiction, all of it is in India and our capabilities that we have built for ourselves, which, by the way, runs one of the largest cloud instances in India, has given us the confident to extend into the space. All of these will require capital, so once we have concluded that, then we will look at any other areas. As of now, there is nothing to talk about in terms of additional capital being needed in any other area.
Manish Adukia - Goldman Sachs
Thank you, Gopal and thanks for the comprehensive answer. So, just to clarify on that and given whatever you have listed is all India assets and given the large transaction in Africa you have announced, it is safe to assume that for the foreseeable future, there are no plans for further capital deployment in non-India assets, would that be fair to say?
Gopal Vittal - Executive Vice Chairman, Bharti Airtel Limited
For now, yes, absolutely I think we will continue to look at bolt-on acquisitions in the spaces that we have already talked about, whether it is in towers, it is in cloud, it is in cybersecurity, in B2B specifically, so those are areas that we will continue to look at, but if there is anything that is going outside, then at this point in time, there is nothing to talk about.
Very clear. My second question, just on ARPU, and when I look at, let us say, the ARPU, while yes, the growth has been weak but even despite limited ARPU growth, you are now generating like decent returns on capital in the India business at about mid- teens, free cash flow is improving every year, your capex requirements are not material, at least in the core wireless business, so in the context of that, one- is it even realistic to assume any meaningful tariff hikes in the foreseeable future, like, what would be the rationale for more tariff hikes? And the business is doing generally okay from a free cash flow returns perspective and a related question, Shashwat mentioned that from here on, you are not happy with how the ARPU was in the previous quarter and you look to accelerate, but what will really change the trajectory? Your postpaid adds have been strong and data adds have been strong, so, given the base is so large without tariff hike, should not the growth only continue to decelerate? If you can just, maybe, provide more color there. Thank you.
Gopal Vittal - Executive Vice Chairman, Bharti Airtel Limited
Manish, let me take this and Shashwat can supplement this if, Shashwat, you have got anything to add. Fundamentally, my belief is that the price architecture in this country is broken. You contrast Indian pricing with African pricing. For every GB that is consumed, there is a little bit of revenue that you get. Here, fundamentally at about Rs.340 to Rs.350, you are capped out because you are running unlimited data plans. Now, nowhere in the world do you see this capping out at unlimited data at these levels. If you look at markets in the US, for example, these kind of plans begin at $60 to $70, you look at even Europe, most of these markets, unlimited data would really begin at about €35 or £30 to £35, so the fact is that it is the architecture of pricing that fundamentally is broken and needs to be repaired. You are absolutely right, at the lower entry levels, the price is, today, at Rs.199 in India. At a time like this, to take up prices on those kind of packs is something that we will need to do with caution, but if the allowances were to change and the architecture were to change, which is really moving from small, medium, large and extra large, where you have different, sort of, amounts of allowance going in, which allows a natural pathway to upgradation. Given the stratification in this country from the very poor all the way to the very rich, the fact is that ARPU will only go up. So it is an unfortunate situation like I have mentioned before, where the rich are paying less than they ought to and the poor are perhaps paying as much as they need to, so this is, I think, the thing that needs to change. Shashwat, is there anything to add?
Shashwat Sharma - Managing Director and Chief Executive Officer (Airtel India)
No, Gopal, I think this is all. Thank you.
Thank you for taking my questions. All the best.
Vaidehi Sharma - Moderator
The next question comes from Mr. Kunal Vora. Mr. Vora, you may please unmute your side, introduce yourself and ask your question now. Mr. Vora, you may please unmute your side, introduce yourself and ask your question now. The next question comes from Mr. Ankur Rudra. Mr. Rudra, you may please unmute your side, introduce yourself and ask your question now.
Ankur Rudra – JP Morgan
Thank you. So, you mentioned ARPU coming a bit lighter than you were expecting, but it is still sort of up 5% thanks to all the organic drivers you have been working on. I am just curious if you think about FY2027, some of the headwinds on international roaming probably are still here, do you think there will be an additional headwind from smartphone shipment drops this year, which might lead to a lower organic ARPU expansion short of any kind of tariff increases?
Gopal Vittal – Executive Vice Chairman, Bharti Airtel Limited
Shashwat, do you want to take that?
Shashwat Sharma – Managing Director and Chief Executive Officer (Airtel India)
I will take that, Gopal. Ankur, I think the only thing I would add, Ankur, is, there is, we have seen some bit of softening of shipments of handsets, etc., and prices going up, so we have not yet seen any impact but we cannot rule it out. Having said that, the organic ARPU levers that we have which we want to sweat much more and especially led by a much bigger play in postpaid as well as getting customers to their best fit plans, upgrading as much as possible, within the tiers itself, driven by consumption. I think, those levers, still, give us good headroom for continuing ARPU growth for many quarters to come. So I think, it is a combination of both. As Gopal said, the pricing architecture, eventually, is the biggest unlock if you ask me, but the feature phone to smartphone space needs to be watched because handset prices have gone up very sharply in the last few weeks, which we will watch.
Ankur Rudra – JP Morgan
Thank you. The second question is on capex. You did highlight several demands on capital across new initiatives, financial services and perhaps even 5G densification, if that is part of the plan. Could you maybe talk about capex plans for the coming year? How this will change versus prior years, particularly given the intensification on the growth bets versus the core and maybe just a followup how overall capital allocation should look like this year? Thank you.
Gopal Vittal – Executive Vice Chairman, Bharti Airtel Limited
Look, I think, let me qualify the capital allocation and just, sort of, reassure it and underscore the point that I was making. The first and primary port of call for any capital allocation will be our core business. I think we have no right to play in any adjacencies unless our core is vibrant. So within the core, radio capex, as I have mentioned before, is moderating. In Africa, it is growing but in India it is moderating. The core capex, which is a smaller component of capex, is moderated. Transport capex- we are going to double down and actually do more. We have been doing this systematically for the last four years. Our fiber points of presence need to increase. A lot more quality of infrastructure needs to be put in place. There is a big project that is underway, which we spoke about last time on resilience, just a resilience of our edge data centers and we are focused right now on building in the next 18 to 24 months- 56 world class edge data centers, which will really stand us in very good stead over the next two to three decades and build a strong point of differentiation for us for computation that could happen at the edge over time, so that will continue to be a focus. Data centers, we have spoken about, which will be a focus. Home business is another big area of focus that will continue to get all the focus and then the cloud business is a modular business in terms of the servers and the compute but it goes into our existing data centers and we are carving out space in all the data centers that we have. We currently have three cloud regions and we will continue to bolster capacity in those regions as and when we need to. Financial services will require some investment. We have announced our investment plan already. We will see how this plays out. We will do this carefully and prudently and we will step up our growth, but we will continue to do that in a way that leverages or, sort of, builds a culture of both collection efficiency as well as compliance. So the net result of all of that, if you look at the capex, while we do not give guidance typically, our sense is that we will be in the ballpark of this year, give or take a little bit.
Vaidehi Sharma – Moderator
The next question comes from Mr. Aditya Suresh. Mr. Suresh, you may please unmute your side, introduce yourself and ask your question now.
Aditya Suresh – Macquarie
Thank you for the opportunity. The first question is on return on capital employed. You had kind of mentioned that there has been an expansion there. Today, on a consolidated basis, you are at about 19%, is it possible to articulate any targets on a, say, two to three year basis in light of these capital allocation bets, which the Company is taking? That is question one. Question two was on Nxtra, could you articulate the business model which you are thinking about for Nxtra, is it going to be tenancy or is it going to be involving GPUs and renting out said GPUs, in that context again, could you, maybe, elaborate and touch on a little bit on your partnership with Google here? Thank you.
On return on capital, I will dodge the bullet of what our targets are, I do not think we give those targets out. I think the fact is that on our core business, given the scale that we have and given the massive amount of heavy lifting that we have seen over the years and the obsession to strip out waste, we hope to continue to see operating leverage as we get growth that should give us additional ,sort of, returns. On the Nxtra side, for us, the model is really around tenancy, this is a colocation model, specifically with Google, they are building a very large AI data center in Visakhapatnam and we are, sort of, building it for them, so there is, again, a colocation-led project. We are currently not doing GPU as a service as I had mentioned earlier. We are watching the space because the GPUs that we bought for ourselves in the recent past, a few hundred GPUs, the efficiency of those GPUs is 10x of what the GPUs were two-and-a-half years ago and they are also cheaper, so it is unbelievable, actually, the pace at which these chips are getting more and more efficient. So we are using it for our own needs for all the AI work that Shashwat spoke about, but our data centers are being built with the latest technologies in terms of cooling capabilities, power efficiency and also a standard toolkit on the build out, which is really world class. So that is an area that we are working on, so, that it is fungible across different customers as we go and build these data centers out.
Aditya Suresh – Macquarie
Thanks, Gopal.
Vaidehi Sharma – Moderator
The next question comes from Mr. Sumangal Nevatia. Mr. Nevatia, you may please unmute your side, introduce yourself and ask your question now.
Sumangal Nevatia - Kotak
Good afternoon. Thanks for the chance. My first question is on the wireless, one on the ARPU since we have seen very impressive, 5% organic growth year-on-year and in our opening remarks, a focus on accelerating ARPU. How should we look at this, in absence of tariff hikes, should we further expect some acceleration here and then, on the wireless capex, we have hit a decade low at around 16% of sales. Are we close to the bottom or should we expect further moderation before 6G capex kicks in the coming years.
Shashwat, can you take the first one and Soumen, maybe, you can take the second.
Shashwat Sharma – Managing Director and Chief Executive Officer (Airtel India)
So on the ARPU, I think, we touched upon this briefly, which was the fact that we see substantial head rooms- there are two parts to it: one is really correcting the pricing architecture going forward, which as and when it happens will happen, but within the current construct, levers of postpaid penetration within our base, which we feel needs a much larger unlock. International roaming, we will see how that plays out this year, but even upgrades within the consumption baskets of our customers and the data that they are consuming, we continue to be very optimistic and this will be our largest growth lever as well, so I think, that is what I would just reiterate.
Soumen Ray – Group Chief Financial Officer, Bharti Airtel Limited and Director, Bharti Hexacom Limited
Coming to the capex on wireless, I think, 16% is a derived number, as Gopal said, the core would be funded completely, we will ensure it is funded, so it has moderated significantly. Yes, it is one of the lowest as percentage sales, also in absolute terms it is very low, but if tomorrow we need to do higher 5G densification, we will not shy away, so we are not chasing a target but we will be optimal and prudent in deploying whatever is required because that is the biggest of the core businesses.
Sumangal Nevatia - Kotak
Got it. One, just, last small question. On the homes ARPU, while we have seen impressive adds over the last few years, ARPU has been decelerating, so should we expect this trend to, kind of, continue, given we are in the land grab phase in the coming years?
Shashwat Sharma - Managing Director and Chief Executive Officer (Airtel India)
I will just take that. I think, on homes, if you see the new additions in the industry have happened at a slightly lower ARPU compared to the traditional ARPU that we had but this is plateauing out. I think, some of our quarter-on-quarter ARPUs are kind of bottoming out, which trend is, we are beginning to see in the last two quarters.
Gopal Vittal – Executive Vice Chairman, Bharti Airtel Limited
Just to qualify that, there are two ways to look at ARPU. One is, the customers that you acquire, new customers and the existing customers, so the existing customers simply because of penetration as it has grown, you had people on higher plans in the past and so, just the mix kind of drives our ARPU down but that, as Shashwat said, the acquisition ARPU is not declining at all over the many quarters, so at some point, I think, the real challenge, here in homes, is to step up our penetration and really grab as much share of homes because long-term, that will be a very significant moat for the Company. This is a business that you return that is very profitable over a period of time because the churn and the customer lifetime value of a home tends to be very low and this is, by the way, this is all across the world and the moment you drive convergence, which means content plus mobility, the lifetime value increases even more, so our metric, really, is to expand the base, right now, that is the focus.
Sumangal Nevatia - Kotak
Thanks and all the best.
Vaidehi Sharma – Moderator
We are very pleased to have Mr. Mittal join us on the call today. I request all the interested participants to kindly use the raise hand option to ask questions addressed to him. With this, the next question comes from Mr. Sanjesh Jain. Mr. Jain, you may please unmute your side, introduce yourself and ask your question now.
Sanjesh Jain – ICICI Securities
Thank you. Thanks for the opportunity. I think I will take this opportunity to address Mr. Mittal. Sir, just wanted to understand now that we have executed the Africa stake sale and in the process, the promoter stake in the Company has gone up and we also have a stated objective of having a equal stake along with the partner Singtel, now, how should we see whether you still continue to have the view that it will be only Bharti Telecom, which will own Bharti Airtel or you see an opportunity to have a equal stake with Pastel and ICIL also owning along with Bharti Telecom?
Sunil Bharti Mittal – Chairman, Bharti Airtel Limited
You know, basically the belief remains that we must have everything through one Company, that should be the controlling promoting shareholder - Bharti Telecom, as you know, historically, has, just, not only been the founding promoter of this Company, has had almost always, for a long period of time, a controlling shareholding of 51%. If you really ask me, my own wish is that in the next, it is hard to put in years on it, in the next decade as I, kind of, come to a point where I hand over the reins to the next generation as shareholders, Bharti Telecom should get back to controlling shareholding - 51% or just over 50%. So, that is 10% more to go and for a Company of this magnitude and size, you can imagine, that it is not a small task. So, the principal direction or vision of that I carry in my mind is all share, that we can, from both ICIL or Bharti family entities and Singtel should go into Bharti Telecom as much as possible. So, to put a bit more granular sort of angle to it, Singtel had a difference of about 7% or rather, has 7% direct stake in Airtel and it had about 6% to equalize, now with this transaction, once this is done and shares are issued, this gap comes down to 3.6%. So first and foremost, we should see overall, this gap dramatically reduces and if Singtel, which has been on the path of a sell down of this direct stake, has to sell, now, much less than earlier. So, 3.6% over the next three years or so, let us say, three to four years, so, one, less than 1% a year, gets Singtel onto the equalization path that they stated in the last two years and that brings us to equal state and then, it will be during this period of effort, depending on how well Gopal, Shashwat and Soumen and the entire management team delivers this wonderful cash flows, more dividends and more buybacks, idea would be to keep using that twin lever to get BTL above the 50% stake, that will be my cherished desire. Our stake must go back to BTL. For that, I need a little bit more leeway in the hands of BTL, which I am hoping will be delivered through continuously enhanced dividend, as you are seeing, and I think, hopefully, in the next couple of years, some buybacks in addition to the dividend and that will give us the necessary capacity in BTL to buy more. If I could do it today, honestly, I will do my transfer to BTL now but BTL needs, that, little bit more room and cash.
Sanjesh Jain – ICICI Securities
That is very clear, Sir, very helpful. Thanks for that answer. Two questions on Shashwat and Gopal and team. First, on the enterprise business, you said the order book has grown 17%, which is quite heartening to hear, how should we see growth rate, now that the commodity business, which we discontinued is behind and the growth rate for FY2027 should be significantly better than FY2026 and will this also mean that the new business will come with a better ROCE in the enterprise part of the business, that is number one. And, second, on the adjacencies, we have been seeing there is a widening gap of market share between us and Jio, we are, more, using fiber as a lever to grow, FWA appears to be having a lower lead time and they are able to grab the customer base much faster, how should we see our strategy of heavily focused on fiber versus FWA for the peer? That is my first question.
Gopal Vittal – Executive Vice Chairman, Bharti Airtel Limited
Sanjesh. Thank you. On B2B, the B2B business actually comprises of a whole portfolio of businesses. So, on the one hand you have got a commoditized business, which is really messaging, where the margins tend to be low but there is also no capex, is just riding on the existing pipes and this business is sort of flattish to declining slightly depending on how you skin it, fundamentally because of price pressures as well as the move to OTT platforms, so this is one part of the business. The second part of the business is, really, connectivity which is growing. The industry grows at about low single digits. We have been growing faster because we have been gaining share over the last few years and we continue to focus on connectivity. We have a leading position here in connectivity, particularly in distributed businesses, manufacturing, distribution, banking, financial services, etc., etc. We need to do, perhaps, a slightly better job in the IT and IT services space, but we have leading positions here on connectivity. Then you come to the third part of the portfolio, which is data centers, which we have already spoken about and the fourth part of the portfolio is our digital businesses. The digital businesses are essentially CPaaS. These are ,sort, of value added over the basic messaging where, you know, the kind of things we have done on spam, the first project that we started with HDFC, working with a direct pipe that really cut spam altogether, no capex here, right, so the margins tend to be lower because when you start looking at EBITDA, it is not necessarily a relevant indicator because there is no capex on that business. That is one type of business. The second is security. Security comprises of, basically, our security operations center, that is a service business, again, very little capex, it is people who run it and tools that run it and then partnerships with security companies which sell products, again, no capex. Then there is cloud, which has high capex, so, when you look at all of this, if you ask me, if we have to step up growth, there will be some margin pressures because there is just a mix of the business, connectivity, we will always continue to have very high margins, CPaaS will have lower margins and digital businesses will have lower margins. Our effort has to be to grow the topline faster and grow the absolute EBITDA, absolute profit faster. I think that should be the focus of this business and that is really what we are embarked on. On the home broadband piece, Shashwat will add to this, but I feel, for us to comment on a competitor and how they are performing is not a relevant thing to do today. The way that we look at it, Sanjesh, is, we have various ways to look at our competitive performance. We use OTT platforms like Meta, which have very rich data that is provided on the number of sessions or the number of connections that are run on different mediums, whether it is wireless, it is fixed or it is fixed wireless access and when I look at that over the last few quarters and I must say that this was not true two quarters ago. Over the last couple of quarters, our performance has been very, very delightful.
Shashwat Sharma - Managing Director and Chief Executive Officer (Airtel India)
Yes, Sanjesh the only thing to add on that is also what we are seeing is, if we can get a customer on fiber, that is the best type of customer. For us, the wireless strategy is augmenting reach a little bit, so wherever we cannot get, we put in there but we will stay fiber first Sanjesh, and I think we can and as Gopal said, on the way we measure it, is slightly differently but we will stay focused on just building as much business as possible through fiber.
Sanjesh, there is one other thing that is happening which is, I think Shashwat alluded to this, that the rising prices of chipsets and memory, particularly on fixed wireless access and if you recall, like a year ago when we doubled down on fixed wireless access, the cost to connect to home was more or less the same as fiber. That has fundamentally changed in the last three to four months. The fixed wireless access has now become very much more expensive. So we have pivoted the whole company back to a dramatic obsession on fiber. In fact, a lot of digital tools have been rolled out to minimize the leakage that we are seeing of installing a fixed wireless connection where a fiber is available and that has almost come to zero now because of the digital tools that have been launched. That has actually been triggered in the month of April and that will play out over the course of the next couple of months before we sort of really ramp this up in a very big way.
That is very clear. Thanks, Gopal. Just one bookkeeping question probably. I see the EPS translation from the EBITDA has been little weaker in my view. The interest and finance cost has been quite sticky at Rs.4000 Crores while our net add keeps coming down, even I was just looking at India business, our interest and finance cost continues to remain little sticky while the deleveraging effort continue. Soumen, can you help us understand what is stopping the finance cost to fall in the same pattern as our net debt and when should we see the transition?
Soumen Ray – Group Chief Financial Officer, Bharti Airtel Limited and Director, Bharti Hexacom Limited
I will answer that quickly. There are two parts, the consolidated and India. In consolidated, there has been a bit of one-off in Africa which will unwind and in India, a large part of debt reduction actually happened towards the end of the quarter. The money of the rights also came in around end of mid of March, the payment of the AGR dues happened on the last day, so, there is reduction and you will see reduction going forth. Thanks, Sanjesh.
Thank you, Sir. Thanks for all those answers and best of luck for the coming quarters.
The next question comes from Mr. Vivekanand Subbaraman. Mr. Subbaraman, you may please unmute your side, introduce yourself and ask your question now.
Vivekanand Subbaraman – Ambit
Thank you so much for the opportunity. Mr. Mittal, you shared certain aspirations, like your desire to see BTL’s stake in Airtel falls (recheck) to 51%, in the past, you also mentioned about a subscriber target of around 800 million, now, with this new bet in lending, what are the other growth areas that you may be looking at, perhaps, which could be growth engines for the group, let us say, in the next decade? That is my first question. I will ask the other ones for Soumen. Thank you.
Sunil Bharti Mittal – Chairman, Bharti Airtel Limited
Airtel and India, as a combination offers a once in a lifetime opportunity to any corporation anywhere in the world, with a billion and a half people- young, hungry for more services and products, a growing country, there is an opportunity which is very rare. There are opportunities that have been available to companies in China of this scale. I cannot really think of any others other than OTT players like Meta and Google and all who have had globe to play with and China, as you know, has been having restrictions that have been confined locally home. So going into Africa, 15 years back was a very, very forward looking visionary move that we made and today that is paying dividends and as Gopal earlier alluded, Africa is there probably India was 10 to 12 years back, you got another billion plus young people growing at rapid clip and what India saw in the last 10 years. In Africa will see in the next 10 years. So, it is really a very strong to play market for us in a very, very densely populated young population and as more AI, as more technology, takes roots, we become more and more relevant by the day and in most African countries, there are only two operators, somewhere there are three, but mostly two.
India has already got three private operators, amongst which, two are having a very large dominant market share. It is a once in a lifetime opportunity and we should add whatever we can add that makes sense. We have been very disciplined, we have not gone into areas that do not meet with the core of a business, and we never had this good problem to solve for, more cash coming than what we need for our core business. Allocate everything to core, allocate more and what is required for growing areas like data center and cloud. Also, look at adjacencies but with a very, very strong disciplined lens. These financial services have been much talked about in the analyst community and investors. The fact is, we are looking for a very small, controlled financial services business at the moment. If it starts to yield great results and you come back and encourage us to do more, we will do more, otherwise what are we saying, we want to give small ticket lending to our own customer base who we understand deeply well and we have demonstrated over the last year-and-a-half to two years that that lending that we do is significantly superior to the best-in-class in the industry and even people like Bajaj Finance and many others come to us to do the LSP program because we identify customers who pay significantly better than the industry benchmark. So there is a clear method behind what we are doing and the total amount that we are looking at allocating in the next five years, we have stated Rs. 20,000 Crores, of which Rs.14,000 Crores has to come from Airtel. It looks like it will be probably significantly less than that, as for the work that we have been doing, it may be much less than that number. We are talking about a very small amount over five years being allocated to financial services and after one to one-and-a-half years, if we do not show our demonstrable proof of the success that we are getting, then you will be sure that we will not be throwing in money behind business that is not making sense for us. We have spoken in the past about expanding in the other geographies. We are very mindful that we have task to do. This Africa exchange of shares that was announced yesterday is akin to acquiring another Company of a large size. A $3 billion transaction means you are making an acquisition and you are making an acquisition of a business that you know deeply well, a business in which all of us are working day and night, adding value, we need to own more of it. Thankfully, the UK regulations allow you to go up to 90%. With this move, in one fell swoop, we have gone up to, now, 78%. Ambition for Airtel should be whatever is allowed to go up to 90%, one day should get there and that is being ably helped by Airtel Africa’s own buyback program. They have been doing buybacks from time-to-time. Hopefully in the next few years, with the buyback program and if some other block comes from any other investor to Airtel’s attention, we will probably, in the next several years, get to that point of owning more of Africa so that we can get more income flowing back to the mothership-Bharti Airtel and reward our shareholders even more and then, after giving allocation to all this, if we are still left with more money, as I mentioned, we will do more dividends we will do buyback programs but we will never become like IT companies, who have done nothing but just taken money out as dividends and buybacks, dividends and buybacks and they become a shadow of themselves. Many of those companies should have been buying leading edge businesses in their own industry in the last 10 to 15
years, they would have been in a different position today. You will probably come back and encourage us, go buy some more good value telecom assets around the globe, but I think that, as Gopal said, nothing in the table today, it is, probably a medium to longer term horizon, we will come back to you, but I think, we will get to a 800 million customers by way of mobile, home broadband, our digital services, our financial services and both between India and Africa, getting to 500 million here and 300 million in Africa is a dream which is visible. You can look at that. It is not too far.
Vivekanand Subbaraman - Ambit
Thank you, that was very helpful. Shashwat and Gopal, extending on your question on pricing architecture, what will it really take for the industry to move to usage based pricing because we have also seen that since the time leading two telcos rolled out 5G, there is still an unlimited offer going on and the two of you perhaps have not yet decided to move even 5G to meter data, so is there a path that you have in mind to moving to metered data or is it just an aspiration still? Thank you.
Vivekanand, I am mindful of time. So, we, probably this will be the last question before I hand it to Vaidehi. As of now, it is a competitive market. We will not do anything that will hurt our business. I have just mentioned that this architecture does not make sense. Let us see how this plays out over time. Vaidehi, back to you.
Vaidehi Sharma - Moderator
Thank you very much Gopal. Thank you everyone and thank you for joining us, Mr. Mittal. We will now begin with the Bharti Hexacom earnings call. I would like to hand over the call to Mr. Soumen Ray for his opening remarks on Bharti Hexacom performance. Over to you, Mr. Soumen!
Soumen Ray - Group Chief Financial Officer, Bharti Airtel Limited and Director, Bharti Hexacom Limited
Thank you, Vaidehi and good afternoon, everyone. Welcome to the Bharti Hexacom Q4 FY2026 earnings call. I have with me, Karthik and Naval on the call. I will start with our FY2026 performance. We delivered strong results with continued operating leverage, led by razor sharp execution and operational excellence. Revenues and EBITDAaL growth came in at about $9.4\%$ and $17.9\%$ respectively. Margins expanded by $3.4\%$ to $47.6\%$ . Strong operating leverage is attributable to the continued efforts on portfolio premiumization and our war on waste agenda. The Company further strengthened its position in both markets with sustained revenue and market share improvement. The homes and office business saw stellar performance with $51\%$ revenue growth and the highest ever net ads of 395,000. Our IPTV services launch is seeing strong traction and strengthening our convergence strategy. During the year, our capex spends were directed towards 5G densification, network modernization and growing our homes and IPTV business rapidly. Despite that, our operating free cash generation, which is EBITDAaL minus capex, came in at about Rs. 2935 Crores, a solid $27\%$ increase over last year. Balance sheet is robust with a net debt excluding leases, at about Rs. 2000 Crores. The Board recommended a dividend of Rs.18 per share as compared to Rs.10 per share last year, in line with our philosophy of progressive payout.
Moving to a quick update on our Q4 performance, we delivered another quarter of strong performance with revenue of Rs. 2414 Crores, growing $2.3\%$ sequentially. EBITDAaL for the quarter came in at over Rs. 1155 Crores with a margin of $47.9\%$ . We ended the quarter with mobile customer base of 28.8 million. Net customer addition for the quarter came in at about 370,000. Smartphone customer addition was strong at almost 5 lakh, about 4,78,000, highest in the last four quarters. ARPU for the quarter was Rs.252, impacted by two days less, whilst on an EDB basis, it would be closer to about Rs. 257 to Rs. 258. Our homes business continues to see strong momentum with record high net ads of 148,000, driving a revenue growth of about $21\%$ sequentially. This momentum is underscored by our FWA expansion to newer pin codes, continued deepening of FTTH footprint and the rollout of IPTV. Capex for the quarter was Rs.586 Crores. Acceleration was as planned, operating free cash generation, which is EBITDAaL minus capex, came in at about Rs. 570 Crores. With that, I will hand over to Vaidehi to open the floor for questions.
Thank you very much, Soumen. We will now begin the Q&A interactive session. Due to time constraints, we would request if you could limit the number of questions to two per participants to enable more participation. Interested participants may click on raise hand option on the Zoom application to join the Q&A queue. With this, the first question comes from Mr. Sanjesh Jain. Mr. Jain, you may please unmute your side, introduce yourself and ask your question now.
Sanjesh Jain - ICICI Securities
Thanks, Soumen, for taking the question. I got two. First, on the comparison of mobile growth of Hexacom versus Airtel, in this year, on both the levers, Hexacom has performed lower than Airtel on revenue, we were 8.3 and Airtel was close to 12, on an EBITDA we
were 15 and Airtel was 17 odd. I thought we had a lever to grow faster than Airtel under penetration and all those levers we had, what changed in this quarter and how should we see it for the next coming year, should this accelerate. What are the corrective measures we have taken, that is number one? Number two, on the utilization of cash flow, all the peripherals what we are doing is at Airtel level. Hexacom largely restricts itself to mobile and FTTH where it is fully funded, should we see a much sharper payout ratio in Hexacom in the coming years? These are my questions. Thank you.
Soumen Ray – Group Chief Financial Officer, Bharti Airtel Limited and Director, Bharti Hexacom Limited
Thanks, Sanjesh. Sanjesh, I think our impression that Hexacom is underpenetrated the two circles that it operates, has borne out well. I mean, of course, we can cut the data the way we want but we have done reasonably well, the ARPU gap is much closer, we have been able to close the ARPU gap. As I had told earlier also, the postpaid penetration bit and the IR bit will be a little differential, as you know, and as I think, mentioned earlier in the call. The smartphone upgrade will see a bit of stress and hence, we might lag a little bit because that is a very strong indicator. We will be launching some new ways of driving convergence and we will see how best we can accelerate the growth of Bharti Hexacom. I would say it is competitive, it is not lagging the market and we continue to look at opportunities as to how to grow faster. ARPU has certainly come out well. We will continue to look at customers as well. On the next question around utilization of cash flow, yes, some of the growth engines that the parent has are not available to Hexacom. Now, it has two challenges Sanjesh. One challenge is, of course, the requirement of investment is not there but on the flip side, the growths and the new growths will be to that extent restricted. We have increased the dividend payout significantly and we have been committed that we will be looking at a progressively increasing dividend payout and we continue to remain on that. I think we have moved from 3 to 4 to 10 to 18, so I think, we have been sticking to our word around progressively increasing the dividend payout.
Sanjesh Jain – ICICI Securities
Thanks. Thanks, Soumen. That is very clear. Just one, if I may squeeze. On the FWA, considering all the issues around chips, which Gopal spoke, do you see home growth can slightly decelerate until this entire chip situation get resolved for Hexacom? So that was one big lever for us.
Soumen Ray – Group Chief Financial Officer, Bharti Airtel Limited and Director, Bharti Hexacom Limited
Yes. So, how do you look at FWA? The way we look at FWA is what is the cost of a connected home? What is the cost of connecting a home? Now, in difficult terrains with fiber, cost of connecting a home is much higher than, let us say, in a plane, let us say, if you are in Maharashtra, it is much easier to lay fiber or in Tamil Nadu or in such places. If you go to NESA, actually, FWA creates an opportunity to go around and connect more homes, which, it will be difficult with fiber. So, I do not think that whilst prices will go up and we will pivot to fiber wherever we can, we are going to give up on the opportunity of acquiring more homes and offices through either FWA or fiber in Bharti Hexacom. No, we will not let up on that opportunity.
Sanjay Jain – ICICI Securities
That is quite clear, Soumen. Thanks very much for answering all those questions and best of luck for the quarters.
Vaidehi Sharma – Moderator
The next question comes from Mr. Pranav Kshatriya. Mr. Kshatriya, you may please unmute your side, introduce yourself and ask your question now.
Pranav Kshatriya – Emkay Global
Yes, thanks for the opportunity. My first question regarding the count of the ARPU, so if I look at this quarter's results, we had a fairly good growth in the base as well as postpaid addition; however, ARPU growth has not happened. You partly explained in the opening remarks that there was some impact of international roaming, is that the only factor which impacted the ARPU in this quarter or there is something else which is playing out?
Well, yes, there is something else which is played out, which is the whole, eat as much as you can on 5G packs, that is the more adoption happens, that will clearly create a headwind. However, having said that, the ARPU that we give is the average for the quarter. I mean, the exit for the quarter, the quarter plays out there at three months but, Pranav, there is no red flags per se, on ARPU, in terms of, is there a cause of concern. The headwinds that we have are similar to any other player in any other geography, which is lower international roaming, handset prices slightly going up and hence having a pressure on 2G to 4G upgrades and the fact that we now have a pack which destroys the whole price ladder, which any Company should have. If you are selling something,
the more you consume the more you pay, not necessarily in the same ratio but certainly in absolute terms. With that getting broken, so, those are the headwinds which are there for this organization as well as for any player in this country.
Pranav Kshatriya – Emkay Global
Thank you. My second question is there has been a good acquisition in the homes subscriber addition. Should we expect the pace of addition to continue or there could be some headwind?
Pranav, first of all, I cannot give you forward-looking statements. We do not give guidance but see, the objective is to continue to grow. As of now, there is no reason for me in earnings call to flag off that there is a concern, but it is a competitive market, so the competition part always exists, but there is no fundamental reason why we are letting up on our effort to grow homes as much or even more. So the effort will continue. Two months from now, we will meet again, three months from now we will meet again and we will see. As I said, whilst the chipset prices have gone up, we are not relenting on our effort on acquisition. We are pivoting- if the fiber is available, we would like to go fiber first and also trying to see how much we can lay fiber. As mentioned to the previous questioning per participant Sanjesh, it is a difficult terrain and so to that extent, the pivoting in these two geographies would be a little less than some other geographies, where it is much easier.
Pranav Kshatriya – Emkay Global
Thank you so much. That is it from my side. I wish you all the very best.
The next question comes from Mr. Vivekanand Subbaraman. Mr. Subbaraman, you may please unmute your side, introduce yourself and ask your question now.
Vivekanand Subbaraman – Ambit
Thank you very much for the opportunity. I am Vivekanand from Ambit. Just one question. What does the regulatory charge this quarter pertain to, is there any new demand from the government which has affected you this quarter? If you could clarify on this, it will be great. Thank you.
Well, you know, as a prudent organization, we look at all the basket of charges and whatever is happening in the ecosystem and we follow a very prudent accounting policy and we do it from time-to-time. There is a regular cadence that we do, guided by, along with the auditors and by the Board and audit committee. So we have felt that there is something that we should, in a prudence, take provision for, which has been disclosed. There is nothing new, exceptional or unearthly which has come. It is just interpretation of issues as time progresses and various things happen in the ecosystem but nothing new.
Soumen, just to understand better, this charge was earlier perhaps part of contingent liabilities and has now been provided for is that how one should think about it, since you are saying that there is no new demand?
Well, I will not get into specific details but it is not a new thing. It was an existing thing. The interpretation of that existing thing has been changed and accordingly it has been provided for.
All right. Thank you and all the best.
Thank you, everyone. Now, I would like to pass it back to Mr. Soumen Ray for his closing remarks.
Soumen Ray – Group Chief Financial Officer, Bharti Airtel Limited and Director, Bharti Hexacom Limited
Thanks a lot, everyone, for joining the call for Q4 FY2026. I look forward to catching up with all of you in the next quarter. Thank you.
Thank you, everyone, for joining us today. The recording of this webinar will be available on our Company website. Have a great day ahead. Bye.