Bharti Airtel will broadly spend ₹30,000 crore as capex for India and ₹9,000 crore ($1 billion) for Africa. It would also raise investments in data centres, going well past 1 gigawatt (Gw) capacity, Sunil Mittal, Bharti Enterprises chairman and promoter of Bharti Airtel, said in a call with investors last week.
The top executive of India's second-largest telecom services provider (telco) said shareholder interest would be kept in mind when taking on new investment opportunities, and will only take up those that make an attractive bets. For issuing dividends, the company would adopt a ‘progressive increase policy’, and this will be stepped up gradually.
Mittal also said Bharti Telecom (BTL), which owns 41 per cent in the listed company (Bharti Airtel), will be the principal vehicle to own Airtel. Bharti group and Singapore's Singtel, a key shareholder, have been equalising their stakes in Bharti Airtel over a period of time due to Singtel's strategy to reduce debt, fund 5G capex and grow its dividends.
Between the two, 8 per cent is left, 7 per cent with Singtel and 1 per cent with the Mittal family. The stakes will be offloaded in an orderly manner and be disposed of in the next several years.
“Singtel will keep selling and perhaps may take 3-4 years to sell-down, according to Mittal. BTL eventually will be the sole promoter entity owning Bharti,” analysts at BofA said in a note following the investor call.
Mittal said Bharti Airtel won’t be making financial investments in British Telecom, where it picked up a 25 per cent stake in 2024. He added that Airtel needs to have controlling stake at the right valuation for any international telco acquisition.
Mittal added Airtel will expand core business and not yield any space in either rural or urban markets both in India or Africa.
The company will continue to step up dividends and assured that there would be higher dividends where progressive increase policy will be in place.
“Post that, there will be opportunities beyond core business like financial services, new territories in Africa and if certain options come out outside the current footprint. The company will be respectful of shareholder views and will only make bets if they find bets very attractive,” BofA said in the note.
On its subsidiary Airtel Money getting a non-banking financial company (NBFC) licence and Airtel committing ₹20,000 crore, Mittal said in the first year, the company will put 10 per cent capital — ₹1500-2,000 crore to work. Of this, the listed entity will put in 70 per cent.
The total investment would likely be the maximum capital required before the NBFC becomes self-sustainable.
BofA said in its note that the company was inspired by NuBank and amount of intelligence that Airtel has from its customer base will come into use. Airtel, for instance, has 3,000 attributes of an individual user and there is tremendous intelligence on data layer across any channel.
The company could enable digital collection or send reminders about equated monthly instalments (EMIs) being due.
“Even the cost of acquisition is much lower and value in the business is about repeat loans and quality of user. One constraint to sort out is that the current context of the Airtel app is from a telco context, and financial services will require marketing investment and word of mouth over a period of time,” analysts said.
On average revenue per user (ARPU), the company reiterated that its goal in this regard is ₹300. This is now 15 per cent short. Mittal added that the company's intention was also to keep the low-end entry point affordable.
Airtel is making serious investments in data centres. It is tying up with artificial intelligence (AI) companies to bring services to customers and is in advanced discussion with several companies.
The company is also using open source LLMs and the effort is to own small language models for enterprise use cases. The company currently has 350-400 GPUs are being trained will be at about 2,000 GPUs in some years. Airtel is also using AI for its own internal use. These include for contracts, coding efficiency etc and around customer care where there is no IVR.
Airtel, Google partner to check spam in messages
Bharti Airtel and Google on Sunday announced a tie-up under which Airtel will use AI-enabled spam protection tool on text messages sent via Google’s messaging platform. The tool is built to protect its customers from potential digital fraud.
“We had not on boarded Google because we first wanted Rich Communication Services messages to be routed through the Airtel spam filter. In a global first, an OTT platform has integrated Airtel’s spam filter into its messaging services,” an Airtel spokesperson said. “We now call on the broader OTT communication platforms to work with us and make sure that customers are protected from the spam and financial fraud menace,” Bharti Airtel, Executive Vice Chairman, Gopal Vittal, said.
 "Bharti Airtel to invest in data centres, ramp up capacity to over 1 Gw")
