Bharti Airtel MD and CEO Gopal Vittal on Tuesday said in his role as executive vice chairman of the company his work will be to oversee growth of new businesses and drive synergies on digital procurement, talent, and network strategy.
Vittal, who has assumed the role as vice chairman of the company, in addition to being the managing director, will mentor CEO and MD designate Shashwat Sharma. Sharma will take charge from January 2026, with Vittal retaining the slot of executive vice chairman.
“I will take on some of the roles that Sunil (Sunil Bharti Mittal) plays today across the group. My overall remit will be to provide oversight across our operations…We believe this will add capacity to the group,” Vittal said during a call with analysts to discuss July-September quarter earnings.
Vittal clarified that he will continue to work with the Bharti Group and is not exploring any other opportunities outside.
Among other responsibilities, Vittal will also look at growing the Africa business and bring it par with India business on the level of technology and other parameters.
“Third area is in terms of incubation and growth of some of the new initiatives that we have started. For example, we have a Payments Bank business and financial services lending business, which can be scaled,” Vittal said, adding the company is making investments in cloud business and will soon take its own cloud propositions to market to solve challenges of public cloud.
Analysts also said that the planned restructuring and leadership change at Bharti Airtel is not going to be disruptive. “Since Vittal will be involved over the next 12+ months in ensuring a gradual and smooth transition, we do not expect this change to be very disruptive. This should be further supported by Bharti’s strong established credentials and our view that the peak of competitive intensity is behind us,” Citi Research said in its note on Tuesday.
On Monday, Airtel reported a net profit at Rs 3,593 crore, which was down 13.6% quarter-on-quarter, and much below Bloomberg’s consensus estimate of Rs 4,398 crore. Consolidated revenues rose 7.7% sequentially to Rs 41,473 crore. The company’s revenue growth was led by tariff hikes.
Surprisingly, the company added 4.2 million 4G/5G users, but lost 2.9 mobile users, largely at the lower-end owing to SIM card consolidations after tariff hikes.
“This decline was milder than what we observed in earlier rounds. As we have seen in the past, these trends normalise over two quarters and we have already seen that normalisation happen through October. We have already seen a trend reversal with customer adds,” Vittal said.
According to Vittal, the flow-through of tariff increase has been as per the company’s expectations, and the the full benefit for the same is expected to be reflected in the coming quarter.
Airtel’s average revenue per user (Arpu) during the quarter rose 10% sequentially to Rs 233.
Vittal reiterated that the return on capital employed (ROCE), is still very low at 11.2% and advocated for a further tariff repair.
On the home broadband space, Airtel is exploring fibre dark areas and new areas to connect homes via fixed wireless access and fibre, to expand the addressable market. The company is live in more than 2,000 cities through a combination of FWA and FTTH.
During the July-September quarter, Airtel company expanded its FWA offerings, which led to additions of 583,000 customers. As on September end, Airtel had a total base of 8.6 million home broadband users.
Vittal said the focus is now to simplify the go-to-market strategy with uniform pricing of the company’s Wi-Fi offering across technologies, activate alternate channels for installation and servicing, strengthen store presence, and scale delivery capacity.
“I do want to reiterate that fibre will always offer a superior experience and our expansion plan is predicated upon eventually converting our fixed wireless access to fibre once fibre reaches the location,” Vittal said.
The company will move to standalone 5G architecture from non-standalone for FWA services by December.
On the capital expenditure (capex), Vittal reiterated that the capex will be lower this year given the massive 5G rollout that happened last year.
“Our capex is going on transport, which has been consistent over the years. The core network has a small component of capex that will continue to get investment as traffic keeps growing. There is some B2B side, which is cables and things like that, which will get investment,” Vittal said.
The company has stopped investing in 4G capacity and is rolling out 5G in markets where it sees demand for 5G on mobile phones and fixed wireless access.
During the quarter, Airtel incurred a capex of Rs 7,675 crore down from Rs 8,000 crore in the preceding quarter.
From: financialexpress
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