What is Airtel seeking from the DoT on AGR dues?
“We have written a few letters to the DoT asking for clarification and basically requesting parity on the treatment of the AGR dues. 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.”
How large are Airtel’s AGR liabilities?
Last month, Bharti Enterprises chairman Sunil Mittal had said that Airtel had written to the DoT asking for reassessment and recalculation of its AGR dues, stating that the company intended to present its case to the government on mathematical correction of errors and was not seeking any special treatment or concessions.
“For anybody, the formula will be the same. If there’s money paid that hasn’t been counted, if there’s double billing that has come through, if that is established, your base principal goes down and that has a cascading effect on penalty, interest and interest on penalty, and the amount can come down significantly,” Mittal had said.
Bharti Airtel’s AGR dues are estimated to exceed Rs 40,000 crore, and the group had previously asked the government to convert these liabilities into equity. Airtel has already paid about Rs 18,000 crore towards AGR dues. The dues can continue to rise as they are not frozen.
Why did Airtel proceed with the remaining rights issue?
On the calling of the remaining rights issue, Vittal said the decision was taken since there was no provision to foreclose the rights issue and the three-year time frame was over.
What are Airtel’s plans for data centres?
On raising capital expenditure for data centres, Vittal said the company’s market share in the data centre segment was relatively low in a highly fragmented market. “We are about 12 per cent market share in the overall data centre market. We have about 120–130 MW of power. Our view is that in the next three to four years this will become about 1 GW capacity, which will give us about 25 per cent share.”
In response to questions from analysts, Vittal said that “there could be opportunities” for Airtel to partner and accelerate the pace of data centre rollouts following Singtel’s acquisition of STT Telemedia’s data centre assets globally as well as in India. Singapore’s Singtel is the oldest investor in Airtel and currently holds about 7.5 per cent stake directly and 40.47 per cent through holding company Bharti Telecom.
How does Airtel plan to drive ARPU growth?
In his first earnings call as chief executive officer of Airtel, Shashwat Sharma said that for average revenue per user (ARPU) to move up, customers would have to pay more for higher data usage.
“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 added that in the absence of tariff repair, Airtel would continue to drive ARPU growth through feature phone-to-smartphone upgrades, prepaid-to-postpaid migrations, data monetisation and international roaming services.
What is Airtel’s stance on 5G slicing and net neutrality?
Vittal noted that 5G slicing, which is yet to be implemented in the Indian market, would not lead to a violation of net neutrality principles because there would be no discrimination of content in any manner.
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