Bharti Airtel yet to hear from DoT on parity of AGR dues with Vodafone Idea

Airtel has sought parity with Vodafone Idea on AGR dues reassessment and says it has written multiple times to the DoT, while outlining its plans on data centres, ARPU growth and 5G strategy

Bharti Airtel is yet to hear back from the department of telecom on its request for parity on adjusted gross revenue (AGR) dues with Vodafone Idea, whose dues were being reassessed, Executive Vice-Chairman Gopal Vittal told analysts in the carrier’s earnings call on Friday, adding that several letters had been sent to the government. 

 

“We have written a few letters asking for clarification and basically requesting parity on the treatment of the AGR deals. We are yet to hear from the DoT. Once we hear from the DoT, we will then decide what our next steps are,” he said. “These letters have already been sent and we're awaiting their response.” 

 

Vittal added that the telco was seeking ‘treatment of parity,’ in several areas, for instance, “computation errors, arithmetical errors, errors of omission, on assessment which is on the basis of parity, based on the Supreme Court verdict.”  

 

Last month, Bharti Enterprises chairman Sunil Mittal has said that Airtel had written to DoT asking for reassessment and recalculations of its dues. Bharti Airtel’s AGR dues are estimated to exceed ₹40,000 crore.

 

On calling of the remaining rights issue, Vittal said that the decision was taken since there was no provision to foreclose the rights issue and the time frame of three years was over. 

 

On raising capex for data centers, Vittal said that the firm’s market share from data center was quite low in a very fragmented market. 

 

“We are about 12% market share on the overall data center market. We have about 120 -130 MW of power. Our is that in the next three to four years this will become about 1 GW capacity which will give us about 25% share.” 

  In response to questions from analysts, Vittal said that “there could be opportunities” for Airtel to partner together and accelerate the pace of data center rollout following Singtel acquiring data centers of STT Telemedia globally as well as in India. Singapore’s Singtel is the oldest investor in Airtel and currently holds about 7.5 per cent share directly and 40.47 per cent share through holding company Bharti Telecom. 

 

In his first earnings call as chief executive officer of Airtel, Shashwat Sharma said that for average revenue per user to move up, customers will have to pay up for using more data. “I think we have to keep reading and look at really a differential pricing architecture where people pay more for more instead of looking at differential 5G or 4G pricing because that creates a little bit of confusion in the market, and customers don't know what they're using,” he said. 

 

He also added that in the absence of tariff repair, Airtel will continue to sweat ARPU growth leveraging feature phone to smartphone upgrades, prepaid to postpaid upgrades, data monetization, and its international roaming services. 

 

Vittal noted that 5G slicing which was yet to be implemented in the Indian market would not lead to violation of net neutrality principles because there will be no discrimination of any content in any way