Good afternoon, and thank you for joining us on this investor call. As you are aware, the board of directors of Bharti Airtel approved a fund raise of up to INR 21,000 crores in its board meeting held yesterday. In order to discuss this further, I have with me on this call our Chairman, Mr. Sunil Bharti Mittal, our MD and CEO India South Asia, Mr. Gopal Vittal, our Group Director Strategy and Business Development, Harjeet Kohli, and CFO India South Asia, Badal Bagri. Before I hand over the call to our Chairman for his opening remarks, I wanted to highlight that we will be opening up this call for a question and answer session. Participants who wish to ask a question can send in their questions using the moderator chat option on their BlueJeans interface.
With this, I hand over the call to our Chairman, Mr. Sunil Bharti Mittal, for his opening remarks. Over to you, sir.
Thank you, Komal. A very warm welcome to all the attendees on this call, our investors and other watchers from the public markets, media. I'm joining an investor call like this after long years, and I think today's call was more appropriate for me to begin with. I am assisted by Gopal, Harjeet, and Badal, and of course, Komal, who handles our investor relations. We'll be here for the next one hour to talk about some of the issues that face the industry, in particular, what's happening at Airtel. Let me begin by talking about our industry and the announcement that we made yesterday. India is truly moving into the digital world on a very accelerated basis. The phase that we have entered now cannot be described anything short of being exponential. More and more people are joining the bandwagon of being on the digital services.
Millions and millions of phones are going into the hands of Indians. These are powerful computing devices capable of doing a lot more than we ever saw before. Digital India is just not a dream anymore. It's a reality. Government services are moving through digital medium. Businesses are moving through digital medium. Monies are moving through digital medium. Healthcare services, education, any and every touchpoint of our economy or public services are now relying more and more on the digital medium to a point that the need for a digital infrastructure is growing exponentially in the country. Rate of adoption, in fact, is something that has surprised all of us. Even at the lower end of the pyramid, people in the rural areas, people on the fringes of society are all joining the mainstream of being on the digital medium.
The last 18 months of pandemic, in fact, has accelerated this particular aspect. I would like to take a lot of credit as our industry, jointly by all the players who are here, that we truly stepped up our efforts and work to ensure that India remained connected. People who moved into their homes, the traffic that moved with them to their homes was well managed. I think we can all, and you can agree with me, compliment the huge effort put in by the teams of all the telecom companies to ensure that India remained connected during this very difficult and trying times, not just for us as individuals, but even for companies at large. I think India has done very well by rolling out extensive 4G network across the country.
Today, India is in step with the globe in terms of ensuring that the citizens enjoy a very high quality broadband services based on 4G. In fact, the 4G rollout has been exponential in this country in the last three or four years. Almost every corner of the country is now ably covered by the 4G. Efforts made by all companies in this regard are lauded. I would say, in particular, Airtel has been able to see this trend coming right from 2012, when we became India's first company to launch 4G services in Kolkata, and thereafter stepped up on our rollout of the services to ensure that we remained relevant, valid, and a leading player in providing mobile broadband services. This 15th of August, our honorable Prime Minister made a very strong appeal to the industry at large. He asked us to take more risks.
He asked us to put more capital. He indeed exhorted the industry and industry players to show their animal spirits and go and grow the country's infrastructure to ensure that Indians can benefit from the futuristic networks that we can all roll out. Prime Minister's pillar of Digital India has been an article of faith with us at Airtel. We believe that the call could not have been more timely by the Prime Minister. Today, when we have taken the step to make a significant announcement of capital investment, which I'll explain in a little while, it responds to his call to the industry at large to put in more manufacturing facilities, to put in more money into healthcare services, to go and do more biosciences, to do more research and activities.
More importantly, ensure that all this is enabled through a very strong medium of Digital India, a vision that he holds very dearly. With all this in mind, it was time for us at Airtel to respond. Yesterday in the board meeting, on a unanimous basis, including our esteemed partner Singtel, we all came to the conclusion that the company needs to raise more capital. Yes, indeed, this has been in a flurry of round of capital increases in the company. You all know that companies who have not been able to raise capital in time have suffered, and importantly, have not been able to partake the benefits of a growing economy that we all seek. The capital that we have decided to raise is known to you, is INR 21,000 crores, which will be by way of a rights issue.
The details are already with you from our release of yesterday. Why are we raising this amount of money? Some questions have been asked, some queries have been posed. The reason for this is very simple. You have expressed from time to time the leverage in our company to be something that bothers you. It bothers us as well. We have been loaded by extraordinary debt, which you could have not imagined just two years back, even one year back, perhaps. The load of AGR, the load of spectrum payments, have indeed created an extraordinary load of debt on the company. While we remain very comfortable, and Gopal has talked about it in the past, I think we are comfortable for business as usual. We will be fine in rolling out more 4G networks.
We'll perhaps even be fine with rolling out part of our 5G networks in substitution to the 4G network. We believe there's an opportunity to really accelerate our growth path now. For that, we wanted to lower our debt leverage, improve our debt leverage, and therefore have access to capital as and when we need for the growth capital that we require. What are the growth triggers that we see imminently in front of us? 5G is upon us now. I have been saying it for the last three or four years, that H2 2022 will be the time when 5G will start to become a reality in our country. Slowly in the key cities, then going into 2023, 2024, into the rest of the country across the length and breadth of our current network.
It seems to me that we are really coming close to that prediction now. The auction of spectrum is likely to happen sometime early next year, and by H2 next year, which is H2 2022, 2023, we will start to see 5G services coming in key cities of India. The other aspect for any new technology or services is the device ecosystem, and I'm very glad to inform all of you that that particular area is looking very good. 15% of devices are 5G enabled, and by the time we get into H2 next year, a very large amount of smartphones will truly be 5G enabled. Another heartening feature is that the price points for 5G devices are coming down. I know once you get used to 5G speeds and 5G throughput capacities, customers will start to lap those services more and more.
It's also India's cherished desire to see 5G coming in fast. We do, of course, hope that the pricing on spectrum will be equally made attractive by the government to ensure India benefits from a robust 5G ecosystem. In addition to 5G, I think we need to roll out more fiber, more than what we have done in the past. We need to prepare our networks for backhauling 5G type of capacities. While we have done a lot of fiber rollout, a lot more needs to be done. As we do that, we will also do millions of new home passes for FTTH broadband services into homes and of course, offices. This has picked up a lot of momentum in the last 12 months. We are seeing more and more people joining Airtel's broadband network.
If you would have seen our last quarter announcement as well, the number of fixed broadband connections are now truly rising exponentially. We cannot let that opportunity be missed out by Airtel, which has been in a leading position, other than BSNL, to serve India's connected needs into homes and offices. That will require capital as well. In the last one year, we are seeing accelerated demand by hyperscalers on Airtel to set up data centers. This is one place where Airtel has the right to win. We not only know how to build data centers, we have the domain knowledge to operate them more efficiently than anybody else in the country. We have submarine cable assets. We were the pioneers in submarine cables. India's first submarine cable going from Chennai to Singapore was done by Airtel.
Since then, we have now got participation and ownership in multiple other submarine cables, which is the heartbeat for any data center. Of course, we have ton of fiber on ground to ensure resiliency of our data centers. We believe we have a significantly higher chance of winning this space and attracting hyperscalers as compared to pure play real estate players. That will require investments as well. The clear position in front of us was business as usual, for which we believe we are well-funded. I think you also believe that. Now go and accelerate on our growth path. What are we seeing in the marketplace? More and more customers are choosing Airtel. Airtel is becoming a place of choice. The brand is resilient. We are on a lifetime high of mobile revenue market share. We are getting more and more broadband customers onto us.
In the enterprise space, which I've not spoken because it takes much lesser capital, the large corporates, the midsize companies, MSMEs are all knocking at our doors to connect them, to provide them solutions. We are also accelerating that path as well. To my mind, there would have never been a better time for us to press on the gas, put more capital into the system, and ensure that we take disproportionate gains out of the market as India grows and adopts more and more digital services. It would be a grave error of duty on our part if this was a time when we stayed with business as usual. I can share with you, I have never felt more confident. I've never felt more comfortable in saying, I can see Airtel taking a very special place in India's corporate pantheon of companies.
I believe we can press on the gas now and move forward to take more market share in mobile services, significantly higher share in our FTTH business, step up on enterprise and global businesses, and importantly, also back it up with strong data center business. I'm glad that some of the pain we took earlier is paying dividends today, and will hold us for the future. We have the largest spectrum pool in the country. We've bought a lot of spectrum in the past auctions. We renewed a lot of spectrum. Importantly, we also brought in a lot of spectrum from Tatas, from Telenor, from Videocon, from Aircel, which is all today helping us in serving our customers. Very importantly, it has become the bedrock for us to serve the customers for many, many more years to come without spending more money on spectrum.
There may be marginal renewals coming up in 2023, 2024, but they are very small and modest. Other than the 5G spectrum, which we will hopefully secure at a reasonable price in the coming year, we are pretty much done on spectrum, which, as you know, is not only a lifeline for us, but also a very heavy capital commitment that goes into it. As we respond to the government's call to invest more money, accelerate the Digital India, we equally expect the government also to respond by having lighter touch regulations, by making life simple for telecom companies. INR 35 of every INR 100 that the telecom revenues generate as revenues go into government levies. The levies are far too high.
If India has to be truly a place where the citizens enjoy digital services, where government gets ton of revenue because of digital vision, it's important that the levies and the load on our industry needs to be brought down. Lastly, yes, this industry needs to have the right economic model. For far too long, we have played in this game by growing the industry at very minimal pricing level. People are consuming 16 GB of data, average per user per month. It's time that the tariffs do take a tick up to make this industry viable, and more importantly, having the decent and appropriate returns on capital to grow into more technology arenas, to roll out more networks, then become a much more viable model of sustainability in the future. In closing, let me say we have been, and we always will be very responsible.
We continuously watch our expenses. We continuously watch our CapEx. We put reasonable CapEx that we can see ahead on the runway. We will not invest 10 years out, but we will never be short that in the next one or two years' growth that comes through is not captured by Airtel. I can assure all of you that this money will be well spent in the areas that I've described to you, and we are committed to partake the gains that this country offers to a handful of players in the marketplace. In my opinion, this is once in a lifetime opportunity. The time for that, to invest more, to accelerate, is here and now. Thank you.
Thank you, sir. The first question is from Kunal Vora of BNP Paribas. He wants to know that in the recent earnings call, the management had indicated that leverage level is comfortable. Is there any change in our thought process? Why are we looking at equity rather than monetizing some of the assets we hold?
Well, the first part is, I think very well answered by me. Business as usual does not require anything. I think we have sensed an opportunity for which we need to accelerate. Could we manage to raise more debt? I have to be honest, we can. There is a lot of goodwill in the marketplace. Our lines from the banks are very low. We can draw more money from the banks. We are getting great responses from the bond markets as well. As you have pointed to us repeatedly, as also our rating agencies, there's a right balance to be achieved between more debt and some equity. In my own opinion, therefore, this new equity is not a change in game plan. This is not a change of heart. This is the need of the hour. This is the need for the company to accelerate beyond business as usual.
As to the second part, I think we remain committed to monetization, but monetization at appropriate time on appropriate terms. We have a very large shareholding in our tower company, Indus, at nearly 42%. That's an asset which is not core to the heart of Airtel, but equally is a very important asset which we don't take lightly. We have ton of fiber. There are moves that we have seen across globally and here in India, where fiber have been monetized, but in the right and appropriate way. I can assure you that these assets are on our radar to be monetized at appropriate time. We are not giving you a different signal today by saying we will not monetize them, but we will not monetize them at any cost. We will do it at the right time, at the right valuation, in the right structure.
Thank you, sir. The next question is around the promoter stake. The promoter stake in Airtel has declined over the last few years. While the rights issue will obviously not result in any reduction, how are you thinking about the long-term stake of promoters into Airtel?
Well, you have to really see it from a promoter group as one, rather than seeing as separate promoter groups. At 56% promoter holding in this company, I would say, this is a fairly large shareholding for the size of the company that we are in. Bharti Telecom, which is the premier promoter group company, in itself holds about 36%, which in itself is a very large block. Then there are blocks held directly by Bharti entities and Singtel entities outside that. I would say we are at a comfortable level at 56%. If your specific question is about Bharti Enterprises stake, I think we see Bharti Telecom as a key subsidiary of the group, which holds 36%, plus another 6+% held by other group companies. At 42%, we remain a very comfortable shareholding level, and honestly, we don't see any reason for market to be alarmed about it.
You also should know that no promoter goes down in shareholding by choice. This industry has seen hell for the last four or five years. 8, 9 operators have disappeared. A very strong combined operator today is struggling. In the face of that, I think you will give us credit that we did dilution or raising of more capital in good time, rather than chasing capital when none would have been available. We were timely. We did the right things. We did not bother about the stock price at different levels. We raised capital, and the outcome has been very clear. We are today standing very tall because of the large amounts of money that we have raised. If that has resulted in some drop of our shareholding, we are fine with that.
Thank you, sir. The next set of questions are from Sanjesh Jain of ICICI Securities. The first question is that Bharti had recently added 5% equity stake in Indus Towers. Therefore, does the company plan to further increase stake in tower company with the rights issue? The second question is on OneWeb. What are your thoughts on the satellite business, and would Bharti Airtel also be investing in OneWeb in the future?
Both points, I mean, Indus, I did cover in my earlier remarks, but as far as Indus is concerned, it's a very strategic asset. A life of a telecom company is in the hands of a tower company. You cannot have a situation where you have a weak tower company, and then you are struggling to run your networks appropriately. We have seen in the past, there were weak operators, GTL and 1 or 2 others, where the operators riding on these networks suffered immensely. Airtel cannot afford that. We ran Infratel as 100% controlled company, and it was listed, as you know. We had a lower stake in the same. In Indus, we had a 42% stake. After the merger, our stake was at a level where we were less comfortable in having greater influence on it. A 5% stake was bought last year.
All I can tell you is the money that we have planned to raise from the rights issue, there is no allocation towards buying Indus stake. Would we desire to have greater influence in Indus at some point in time in the future? The answer is a definite yes. It will be done at the appropriate time. It will be done only with a purpose, strategic purpose. Importantly, as I said, this is a monetizable asset. I can tell you, if you have to monetize it tomorrow, you will be significantly better served by handing over influence to somebody else rather than giving them a weak shareholding in their hands. Let's watch this space. There is no hurry on this. Last year's 5% has given us an extra board seat, which has increased our influence in Indus.
We look at it a much stronger way, and we feel much more comfortable that Airtel today is in safe hands when its towers are radiating on the basis of what Indus has created. On the OneWeb, I think this question keeps on coming occasionally. Airtel has no investment into OneWeb global. The entire investment into OneWeb from Bharti is from Bharti Enterprises, with no correlation with Airtel. As far as Airtel is concerned, it will be a partner of choice for OneWeb in India, and the total investment in India of OneWeb in setting up ground stations will be circa $30 million-$40 million. Let's say about INR 250 crore-INR 300 crore, of which OneWeb global will be taking some debt. Airtel's equity participation in Indian joint venture could be in the order magnitude of $5 million-$7 million.
We are talking about INR 30 crores, INR 40 crores, INR 50 crores of investment in OneWeb for India segment only. I must make this very clear. There are no plans for Airtel to buy my stake from Bharti Enterprises or invest into OneWeb global. We are talking about very tiny amounts for Airtel to be the custodian of OneWeb on the Indian and South Asian market.
Sir, the next set of questions are on the balance sheet. India Inc in general has been talking about reducing leverage. What is the view of Bharti Airtel's promoter on deleveraging the Airtel balance sheet, and what is the steady state net debt to EBITDA target, if you can share it for the company? A related question is, for the FCF generation opportunities going forward into next year, how are we thinking about it? Would we delever the balance sheet, or would we invest it back into something related?
Well, we are very pure play telecom company. We have never deviated. We don't do other industries from Airtel. All those are done painstakingly by our family entities, our Bharti entities. We have never mixed and matched. We don't do real estate from here. We don't do manufacturing from here. We don't do other stuff from here. This is a pure play telecom company. This was a commitment to our shareholders. Back 25 years back when we started, we have kept absolutely pure to it. There are some adjacencies which keep on knocking at our doors. We evaluate them. Most of the time we have rejected it. If something comes up which is digital in its nature and core to our business, in future, we could look at that, but they have to be very low-capital intensity opportunities.
Our large capital intensity, or 95% of it, has to be in the telecommunications arena. I would say, in as far as our de-leveraging strategy is concerned, if you ask me personally what's my comfort level, my comfort level is debt to EBITDA ratio of 2. Can we get there? My own view is by and by, we should get there. We have, as I said, very large monetizable assets. We have a huge equity in Africa. We have a huge equity sitting here in Bharti Infratel, Indus Towers, and we have huge fiber assets that have not been encashed at all, 100% sitting with Airtel. There are, of course, very large real estate assets. At some point in time, they could become opportunities as well. I also believe that the cash flow from this industry are bound to increase.
If this industry has to be sustainable, you will start to see an early tick-up of tariffs and ARPU going into the next several months. A combination of monetization on one hand and improved financials on the other, you'll start to see in the next two years, and I'm not talking about 10 years, I'm talking about just two, three years, Airtel becoming much, much more comfortable in its debt profile.
Thank you, sir. The next set of questions are around our CapEx trajectory. Would today's narrative around 5G and accelerated CapEx meaningfully change our CapEx trajectory? In the instance that the Indian market goes to a duopoly, could there be a meaningful change in our CapEx?
Well, I would say we have done significant CapEx. We have not shied away from CapEx. We know our telecom companies who have pulled their hand on CapEx have suffered heavily. This is something we have known for 20 years, and therefore, always we have been ahead of the CapEx game. My own view is that we will continue to roll out CapEx as required. I also personally feel that as we go forward, the consumption of a user per customer is not going to exponentially grow from 16 GB, which is already a global record, by the way. We believe there's enough capacity that has been created to now generate rewards back for us.
In the event there was a situation where more customers were to suddenly to come into Airtel fold, I think we are in a good shape to carry them through our fiber mobile networks. I don't see, therefore, any reason for us to be worried about. yes, this INR 21,000 crores gives us exactly that leverage that we need, the fuel to grow that extra mile that we can sense is around the corner.
Right, sir. A related question is, as part of this larger investment that we are talking about, could we also see a change in our handset strategy?
I want to toss this to Gopal. He is much more closer onto the handset side. So far, our company has been fortunate, or the industry has been fortunate for, I would say, 25 years, not to spend INR billions and billions of subsidies that the world does across their markets. India has escaped that. So far, we have not been requiring to do it. I'm sure Gopal has a clear strategy on that as well.
Yeah, I think we've spoken about this in previous earnings calls as well. Handset subsidies by themselves are pretty much, I would say, a month's game. Because what happens is that when the handset comes for a renewal at the end of two years or 30 months, the customer makes the choice all over again, how to choose the network of his or her choice. As a consequence, to stay in the same place, we need to keep subsidizing again and again. I think world over, it's now clear that handsets are really value-destructive in that respect. Having said that, I think this is a competitive industry, we will look at what happens in the marketplace. Through a combination of good marketing optics, through a combination of some capabilities, platforms around locks.
We've experimented with lending options to actually provide some loans to our banking partners on a lock device. We've done some pilots with a few companies, some of the large manufacturers, OEM manufacturers. We pretty much have clarity on how we deal with this. The one thing I do want to underscore is that if you look at handsets as a market, unlike any other consumer market in India, the lowest priced handsets, smartphones specifically, between INR 4,000 and INR 6,000, strangely, have actually the smallest market share of the total handset market in India. That is simply because consumers spend four to five hours on their device, and therefore, when they upgrade, they're looking for a good quality device. As a consequence, I think we are going to watch the space, and then based on what happens competitively, we will take our position.
Gopal, the next set of questions is on ARPU. What do you believe is the long-term ARPU trajectory for the Indian industry as a whole, and which player do you think will blink first in terms of taking up the tariff hikes this time around?
Well, this has been my stated position for the last several years. We need to get to INR 200 very quickly. I don't have a crystal ball in front of me, but if I have to say this industry needs to survive, this industry needs to thrive, we need to get to INR 200 within this financial year. I would say, we should aim to be at INR 200 by the time we end this financial year. Eventually, this industry needs to be at INR 300 per customer per month. In that, you can enjoy ton of data. They're Indian, they're used to music, entertainment, Netflix, Amazon Prime, whatever is required should be available to our customers, financial services, banking, electronic banking, health services. We will put in a lot more stuff, but we need to get to an INR 200 point, and then eventually INR 300.
The beauty of our industry is it's very granular, it's very segmented. For INR 100, a customer will be able to be on the network, have a small amount of snacking of data, and then you can have customers going up to INR 600, INR 700, INR 800 enjoying everything possible under the sun. Even then, the tariffs in this country will be by far the lowest anywhere in the world. I remain very confident that we have seen the worst now in terms of tariff wars. We have seen the worst in terms of ARPU contraction. Do remember that in 2016, September, at the launch of a new powerful competitors, we had all gone below INR 100. We are at about midpoint, INR 145, INR 150s. This will start to trend towards INR 200 within this financial year. That's where my indication is.
I would hasten to add that I have a strong confidence that the industry will get to INR 200 within the financial year.
Thank you, sir. One set of questions from investors is around the timing of the rights issue. In general, we have seen that our stock price was doing very well. Our on-ground execution has been strong. We have been gaining market share. Why did we choose to dilute now rather than waiting for the industry to consolidate even more and share price to reach INR 750,000 levels?
Well, there's never the right time for anything. You can always, in hindsight, look at things. Imagine if we wouldn't have done our first rights issue, imagine we wouldn't have done our QIP and FCCB. Possibly, we wouldn't have had the right to do another rights issue. Our company could have been in doldrums. We could have been in serious difficulties. Rather than being too opportunistic, too greedy in terms of what pricing can come through, you have to do things at the right time. My biggest concern would be that you would have accused me and my team back to say, "Why didn't you wake up in time when you knew very clearly that such a large growth opportunity is staring at you?" We can see it, I'm not exaggerating here. We can see it, the time, as I said, is here and now.
Any delay, you could have one or two months delay, I'm not talking about a delay of more fundraising to next year could have been detrimental to the fortunes of this company. I hope that we will be able to have a chat a year from now, and you will be able to say, "This was the right decision.
Right, sir. The next set of questions are on our digital strategy. With recent restructuring, should we expect Bharti Airtel to be more aggressive in the digital side? Are we looking to monetize the digital side of the business? Could we have any strategic investment coming in, either at the Airtel level or into the digital side of the business?
Well, digital has been area where we picked up momentum, albeit slowly. I think most companies which are coming from traditional backgrounds, even though they are in technology like Airtel, take a little bit of time to get going, and many don't actually get going at all. We have never used narrative of digital to galvanize our story. We have been working in the trenches on our digital strategy. I can tell you that I am today so pleased to share with you that Airtel truly is today a company which is digital in its core, digital in its services, and importantly, the customers are feeling it. Whether it's the advertising side of it, whether it's the Airtel IQ-based touch points to our sales team, our entire sales management, distribution management, our networks internally being monitored on digital.
Importantly, more and more enterprises are picking up our digital services. Wynk has got now a record number of customers using it, active customers. Airtel Payments Bank has got a record throughput of transactions and customers on its network. Airtel Thanks is in a record-breaking addition of customers using a variety of digital services. Today, I would say we are strongly a digital company, and in the coming quarters, you'll start to see us now talking a lot more about it, and also trying to give you our revenues coming from the digital, which will start to get fairly impressive, I would say. Pure-play digital revenues, which you know are all more or less flowing through the EBITDA line, are all coming through very strongly. We have, again, a right to win there because the right platforms have been laid out.
It has taken us four or five years to get there, but we are there now. In terms of will we monetize digital? I must mention here, and I have heard this feedback from the market. Why did you buy out 20% stake back in Telemedia on the DTH? I think people get wiser in hindsight. All our customer-facing units. Where we go to the customer needs to be in the complete control of one company, and one which is Airtel. When you have a subsidiary which has a different set of shareholders, however friendly and known to us, like Warburg Pincus, there are two boards, two separate companies, related party transactions. You have seen the Airtel Black has been hugely well-received in the marketplace, big success. We want to give all our services which are go-to-market, customer facing, as one.
Digital, to my mind, again, is something we can't slice and dice. We need to keep it all under one company, which is Airtel. Whereas infrastructure pieces like fiber and towers are very different. They are not my go-to-market assets. They can be sold off, they can be monetized, they can be part monetized or wholly monetized. But the company which faces the customer must remain one. If you will see ever any alliances, any tie-ups, any equities being given to some strategic key investors from the globe, they'll be only at Bharti Airtel and not in bits and pieces downstairs.
Sir, some investors are actually moving back to the tariff narrative we just discussed, and people want to know that why doesn't Airtel take the lead in raising tariffs in the industry?
Well, in a limited way, we have been doing it. We moved first to INR 49 as a minimum click-in charge, then we have taken it recently to INR 79 on an all-India basis. The good news is that it's been very well received in the marketplace. Can this go to INR 99 eventually? My answer would be an emphatic yes. The question is, when? In the end, we are also bound by the market forces. We can't be an outlier beyond a point. You can be having some premium given your strength of brand and the attractiveness of you to the customers, but you can't go beyond a point where you start to hurt yourself. We will be vigilant, but we will be happy to take small baby steps, which could even be first and foremost, compared to others.
I can assure you that we will not shy away from doing it. These INR 79 and some postpaid plans which have been taken up are a testimony that we have run out of patience, and we have taken the first move.
Right, sir. The next set of questions are on Airtel Africa. How do you think about Airtel Africa over the longer term or the medium term horizon? Could Bharti actually look to exit the asset at some point of time in the future if we felt that the India opportunity in itself was very compelling?
Well, Africa is now done. If you had to wind back the clock, that money could have been put into India. The answer could be toss-up, could be both ways. Africa looked very attractive, and we went in there. It's taken us much, much longer than we would have originally thought in creating a success. It's been 10 years now. We are in our 11th year there, but the last four years have been delightful. What a turnaround story this has been, and this is a true Bharti Airtel DNA, where we don't easily give up. Today, that company is outstripping the competitors in terms of growth rates in every market that we operate. It's solidly an EBITDA positive company. It's a dividend-paying company and a regular dividend-paying company.
We also have a very clear dividend strategy there, and the stock price has also rallied up in the last year and a half. It's an asset which doesn't load Airtel India. It's an independent asset, independent board. It's a FTSE 250 company. They are listed on the London Stock Exchange. Company will continue to hopefully grow at a faster clip. We have made reasonably strong interventions and investments in Africa to reap the rewards going forward. Could there be an event in Africa at some point in time? Who knows? You can never say never to anything. Of recent vintages, what we have done is showcasing Airtel Africa Money, which has brought in three very strong marquee investors demonstrating a massive hidden value, a hidden gem within Airtel Africa, which is probably the same value as the mothership.
That has been demonstrated through investments recently by QIA, before that TPG, and of course, Mastercard. I can share with you a lot more people are very keen to subscribe to more equity of Airtel Money there. My own view is we have a very strong asset, which is growing at probably twice the pace of a competitive set of players in the market. Let's grow this asset. We have spent a lot of time, a lot of money on this. Let this be a $10 billion, $15 billion, $20 billion asset in the next few years. I have no doubt that if we can continue to show what we have been doing in the last few years, the next four or five years could have a multiplier effect on the value equation in Africa.
Thank you, sir. Shifting gears a little bit, some of the investors want to know what is the leverage at Bharti Telecom, and could we actually have a scenario where Bharti Telecom again sells shares in the future to bring down leverage?
Well, I know most of you are upset with what we did, and I know this may be a matter of concern. I think we are at a level where selling any more would really be not appropriate for us, and we have no plans. I think we have to see ourselves in the situation when we did that. The debt load on the company was high. AGR had come like a ton of bricks. BTL had a big leverage. Rating agencies had started to roll in that debt into our overall debt. The messages we were getting was that people hate promoter companies being leveraged. Even though we had no, as you know, pledge of shares or anything like that, which we have never done. That message was loud and clear. We responded to that.
Today, Bharti Telecom has zero debt, that means that company doesn't need to do anything. We didn't last time sell and pay ourselves rich dividends to enjoy cash flows coming to us as shareholders. It was just to pay back the debt, which has been done. There is no plan. I don't want to ever pin myself down to say ever, but there are no plans to sell anything, and Bharti Telecom is absolutely in a comfortable position to subscribe to its portion, and perhaps much more.
Thank you, sir. One question is on the structure of the rights issue itself. Why this deferred payment structure, rather than actually taking money up front? Why staggering it out over 36 months?
Well, I think we've followed some of the best leading rights issue in the marketplace. We saw Reliance and Tatas do it. We just felt that was the right thing to do. Secondly, more importantly, this allows the shareholders to put in money over a period of time, gives them a better, I would say, value for their money, time value for their money. We will draw this money as Gopal's plans keep on getting crystallized. As his acceleration starts to take place, we will keep on coming back to the market. In our assessment, it should not be more than three years. Will it be six months? No. There's a reasonable period indicated out there. We'll pick up 25% immediately.
One tranche will happen probably midpoint. Much before the three years are up, depending on how the cash flows, if the tariffs suddenly rise, may have more leverage to defer by a few months. Let's see how it goes. The idea was to make it easy for all to invest and take money only when it is required.
A related question is, what is the general capital allocation policy you would like to follow? How do you think about raising money at the parent level, and what are the parameters within which you would invest it in the subsidiary companies?
Well, I would say subsidiary companies are all, which are go-to-market, are going to be intrinsically 100% owned by us. Today, if we had clarity on non-telecom revenues not being AGR-ized, I would put DTH in the same bucket as Airtel. Even if they are 100% subsidiaries, whether it is DTH or it is our digital player, they are all really part of the mothership. Take it as one. The capital allocation is for all these areas. In terms of infrastructure side, data center is where we have got Carlyle now, that becomes a subsidiary in which you have an additional shareholder. The money that we have got from Carlyle, some more is to come by March, probably is giving us enough leverage to roll out some data centers. To accelerate that, we are allocating some more money from this rights issue.
The allocation will be on a need basis. What we can see for the next two years, max three years, we'll start to invest in that. We don't want to heavily front-load investments. The beauty of telecommunications is you don't go out and build 10 million steel plant or a 10 million ton refinery or a 10 million ton fertilizer plant. You grow as the need comes, equally you need to be prepared for a large influx of customers or traffic rising. To that extent, as I said, we'll be very responsible in putting just enough CapEx to take us for the next one or two years, because even if you go wrong in your assessment, you always catch up with the normal growth. That's the way we will allocate our money. We are very responsible. Two things are critical for us, war on waste.
We challenge every dollar that we need to spend, but equally, we don't hesitate to spend $100 million where it's required. That's the philosophy we always had and will continue to have.
Thank you, sir. In the interest of time, I will only be taking two more questions. The first question is a related question on CapEx. The 4G CapEx cycle eventually saw us investing close to INR 35 billion. Where do we think the 5G CapEx will lead us? What will the 5G cycle lead us? What will be the total investment that we foresee over the 5G CapEx cycle? The second question is, there is a third operator in the market who is weak, possibly likely to go through the IBC route. Would we be interested in any assets there?
I think the second question is very hypothetical. I shouldn't be answering. My stated position has been India should see a three-private player scenario, I will still keep on actively supporting that. We have enough spectrum. We really don't need any more assets to be taken by from anybody else. In our industry, the value of base stations, towers is very limited. Fiber which is sunk to the ground is very limited. I would say we should all hope that even though weaker, a third operator should be there and be in the marketplace. That would really be my view. Komal, the first part of your question was?
Sir, what is the overall 5G CapEx?
The 5G CapEx. On the 5G CapEx, I would say, in my opinion, 4G is largely done other than the extra capacity that we are trying to create for any surge in traffic for which we'll provide for. The 5G CapEx will start to replace our cycle of 4G CapEx. I don't see a significantly higher amount of 5G CapEx coming through. The beauty of the 5G is that it has very large capacities. I mean, the difference from 2G to 3G to 4G, we have seen the delta of capacity creation with the same dollar is huge. In 5G, of course, it goes into 100x situation from 4G. Putting a 5G in areas where there's more traffic on 4G will be ideal. We will be very granular, very modular in our approach. These cities will be taken up first.
We spot the 5G device population in each of our market. We go actually each of our wireless data. Wherever we see more 5G devices showing up on our network, we will start to light those 5G base stations up. They will work very seamlessly with our 4G network as well. It will be very judiciously spent. That's why I'm saying, if we can somehow have the right price point for the spectrum, which we urge the government to look into, the growth of the 5G network will follow the traffic, the devices. I travel, even despite the pandemic, actively across the world, and I can tell you, it's not that everywhere you're going into London or into Paris or into New York, you are seeing 5G networks or people actively using 5G network.
It's getting better by the day, but it's not house on fire at the moment. India will also see 5G coming in a nice pace, which will not put too much pressure. One area which I must highlight is the fiber. You cannot be caught without a guard by not having the backhaul in place. That part you need to invest now, because 5G is coming. It's only a matter of whether it's six months after we H2 next year or one year, and that takes time. Fiber digging, fiber connectivity is a long lead time, and a large investment has to go there. On the radio network side or the core of 5G, I will not worry too much. It's very modular and will be well-planned.
Thank you, sir. I think with this we will conclude the call. I would like to pass it back to you, sir, for any closing remarks.
Well, thank you very much. Thank you for your patient listening. We may not have been able to answer all the questions in the given time, but I hope you get a drift of where our mind is. We will remain very focused on how we spend our monies. Your money, actually. You give us the money, we are the custodians. We participate alongside you to give you the confidence that it's not just your money, but it's a collective pool of monies that we are responsible for. It'll be very well spent. I personally feel that the dollar that we are going to spend hereinafter is going to yield a significantly better return than we have seen in a long period of time. Will we get to the heady days of the first 10 years of Airtel, where we had 32% IRR? Possibly not.
Will we remain in these 2%, 3%, 4% kind of returns? Answer is again, absolutely not. We will be in healthy teens, and I'm not talking about too distant in the future. Every dollar that we can spend now must be spent, otherwise we'll miss this opportunity. Thank you.
Thank you.