Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. I'm Sonika, the operator for this webinar. Welcome to the Bharti Airtel Limited third quarter ended December 31st, 2022 earnings webinar. Present with us today is the senior leadership team of Bharti Airtel Limited. I must remind you that the overview and discussion today may include certain forward-looking statements that must be viewed in conjunction with the risks that we face.
Post the management opening remarks, we will open up for interactive Q&A session. Interested participant may click on raise hand option on Zoom application to join the Q&A queue. The participant may click this option during the management opening remarks itself to ensure they find a place in the queue. Upon announcement of name, participant to kindly click on unmute myself in the pop-up on screen and start asking the question post-introduction. With this, I would like to hand over to Mr. Gopal Vittal for the opening remarks.
Thank you. A very warm welcome to all of you on this conference call. Our Soumen, our CFO, Harjeet Kohli, and Naval, our new Head of Investor Relations. This quarter I really want to focus on, you know, how we are building Airtel of the future. Before I do that, let me give you a quick update on our business, and let me start with ESG. We've received our ESG ratings from two agencies, CDP as well as MSCI. CDP, as you may know, is an international nonprofit organization, recognized by GSMA, while MSCI is a global agency. We're pleased that both the ratings have improved. We need to do more and that is something that will be an effort going forward.
Also, we won the ICSI National Award for Excellence in Corporate Governance for 2022. This was presented by the Institute of Company Secretaries of India. We're also pleased that the reduction of carbon footprint is now very deeply embedded across both Nxtra, our data center business, as well as our mobile networks.
We plan to make Nxtra fully green in line with government regulations, and there has been a significant ramp up of solar sites and plans for solar sites for wireless on the wireless side. Let me turn to our performance. The most gratifying thing that we have seen in this quarter is that despite stepped up 5G rollout and consequently, CapEx, our net debt has come down by INR 3,000 crore. This is really because of very strong operating free cash flows.
Looking ahead, we expect our net debt to go down further in the coming year. We've delivered in the quarter, as you know, a competitive and consistent performance. Our consolidated revenue grew by 3.7% sequentially to hit INR 35,800 odd crores. EBITDA margins are at 52%. This is an expansion from last quarter's 51.3%. Margins are up really due to three reasons.
One is our continued operating leverage. The second is a strong churn-based program that continues to be a big focus for the company. The third is a flow-through of lower Spectrum Usage Charges that were announced by the government. On a gratifying note, the growth has been broad-based across segments.
As you know, our performance, and I've spoken about this before, is really based on a very simple strategy, backed by solid execution. Our focus is really to really win with quality customers, consistently improve their experience through a combination of technology, of digital tools, and creating the right culture within the company.
As a part of this, we take great pride in the fact that we have built perhaps the most aspirational brand in the industry. Our concern continues to be return on capital employed. Today at a consolidated level, we are at 11.9%. India return on capital employed is less than 9%. Therefore we do believe that the ARPU needs to go up. An ARPU of INR 300 is critical for a respectable return on capital employed.
That is something that we hope will happen in due course of time. Let me move to give you a quick update on each of our segments. For the quarter, I would say that the standout performance has really been our wireless segment.
We've seen 4.4 million revenue earning customer net additions. As you know, we have a stringent definition of revenue earning customers, which is really revenue earned on the, on a rolling 30-day basis. In terms of 4G net additions, we have added 6.4 million. Postpaid net adds has gone from roughly 280 odd thousand last quarter to 650 thousand this quarter. That's been a sharp upsurge.
Overall ARPU has moved up from INR 190 to INR 193, INR 3 growth. This has really been driven by upgrades on both the 4G side as well as postpaid. Like I mentioned last quarter, sophisticated data monetization using contextual marketing. In the mobile segment we also disrupted the international roaming area by launching the Airtel World Pass. This World Pass really gives you, for one plan, access to any country in the world. Regardless of when you are transiting through a particular airport lounge, onto your destination, the pack works.
On tariffs, we, as you know, introduced, took up tariffs of the entry-level plans from 99 to 155. We are pleased that it met our action standards, in fact exceeded our action standards in both Haryana and Odisha, we have now taken this across 22 circles in the country. Let me turn to broadband.
Broadband continues to look strong. We've added 432,000 broadband net adds this quarter. We are now present in 1,140 cities. This is up from 847 last year. We have 30 million homes passed already, we are on track. We actually have 25 million homes passed, we are on track to actually get to 2024, 30 million homes passed.
The LCO model, which is the model that we use with local cable operators, has been a very interesting innovation for us, and this is one of the reasons that we are able to power ahead and expand to many more cities. It is a CapEx-light business model, which is very healthy in terms of return on capital relative to the own model.
It works very well in non-flat, in flat-bed geographies, which is not the high-rise kind of geographies. DTH net adds were at 2 lakh 14,000, and this is up from 66,000 last quarter. After a long time, we've seen some growth in DTH. This is really happening because of a very simple strategy that we have introduced.
Number one is we have dramatically simplified our tariff plans, so there are really now eight tariff plans across the country with different bundles. The second is a strategy of convergence, which is really unique to Airtel in the form of Airtel Black, where we are bundling with both linear as well as OTT content into our broadband offer. This, you must know, is in an industry that continues to be under serious pressure.
Clearly there's more to be done on DTH. We are not calling any victory yet, but these are just very early green shoots. Airtel Business continues to be a strong performance. This, as you know, is a jewel in our portfolio. We've grown sequentially as 2.5%. Today, I would say decisively, we are the largest B2B player.
Our margins in this business are just south of 40%. This is the best in the industry. I think our strategy of going both wide and deep, wide to cover more and more accounts, and deep to build stronger relationships and more solutions with more share of wallet from existing accounts, is beginning to deliver.
We've had some serious wins in the top, out of the top 500 customers in about 50 customers. We're also building strong capabilities around having strong wins on IoT, CPaaS and Nxtra, which is our data center business. Our payments bank customer deposits grew by 50% over last year. We've hit a revenue run rate of about INR 1,300 crores.
The bank is now building momentum, and I would say is entering a virtuous cycle with serious benefits to the telco on Churn. You would have seen a decline in the monthly transacting users this quarter, but that is just on account of seasonal dip on remittances. As we look at January, we're already well past the previous quarter, so the momentum on the bank will continue.
Our digital businesses are at an annualized run rate of a little over INR 1,000 crores, about INR 1,050 crores. We have one of the highlights of the quarter is that we won a large multi-year tender for cloud with DIKSHA, which is a national platform for school education by the Ministry of Education. Let me now turn to really, the focus for this earnings call, which is the future of Airtel.
I wanna look at how we are building Airtel of the future around five big themes. The first big theme or the first big focus area for us is really our portfolio. Our portfolio is now resilient and diverse. If you look at our portfolio, Africa accounts for about 30% of our business. India wireless is 50%, and the balance is in our fast-growing homes and enterprise business.
This portfolio gives us a unique ability to withstand risks while being solidly positioned for where growth is coming from. Investments will continue and go into where the growth is, and this will hopefully further strengthen our portfolio. The second theme that I want to pick up is rural. In 60,000 high-potential villages, Airtel is just not present.
We could have gone there earlier, but today I think the time is right for us to expand into these areas. This expansion will give us our fair share and provide a fair market share and provide tailwind to the business. We're using a lot of sophisticated data science to decide which are the places that we really need to roll out. In these 60,000 high-potential villages, we've identified roughly 40,000 high-potential clusters of communities.
For us, it's really important that a individual tower is profitable and revenue accretive. Therefore, these clusters of communities are where the community of interest is. It's not just a island that we look at, but we look at where the traffic is moving, where population is dispersed in order to maximize the revenue that we offer.
The third theme that I want to pick up is the top 150 towns. The top 150 cities in India account for about 40% of the Indian telecom market. Here I'm talking about everything. Mobile, broadband, B2B, DTH, all of it. Here we are looking at three big areas which we think are massive opportunities.
The first is using 5G as a lever and a pivot to really drive our postpaid growth. 5G is now live in 70 cities. We will be live in about 300 cities by March 2023. As I mentioned before, all of urban will be covered by March 2024. The interesting thing is that on the NSA technology, our commercial trials are giving us 30% higher coverage than what we would have had if we had gone with SA.
That's a very, very big big impact which will be felt in terms of the number of 5G sites that we put up. Secondly, our experience is good and we're seeing clearly up to 300, 400, sometimes 500 Mbps speeds.
One big area is really 5G, using it as a pivot to grow our high-value base, particularly postpaid. The second big area in the top 150 city strategy is really what we're calling the One Transport Plan. Transport is a shared infrastructure. It works for both our mobile business, our B2B business, as well as our broadband business, because fiber is then carried from the tower into the home or the office.
We're now bringing very sophisticated data science to forecast and predict the demand across all our businesses, whether it's B2B, broadband, or the way traffic will grow in the next 12 months. Therefore, how do we need to plan this fiberization based on the traffic and the likely growth of demand?
In effect, for the same INR invested, our plan is to get more coverage, more growth, and at a lower system cost. The third area that I wanna talk about in the top 150 cities is our go-to-market approach on the enterprise side. If you look at the entire enterprise business, of the top 500 accounts, we have in 50 accounts, we have seen almost 300% growth. There's a massive growth that we've seen in 50 accounts of the top 500.
This is really due to deep and brilliant account management, which is an opportunity in itself because in the other 450 accounts, we haven't seen that kind of growth. For us to go deeper and create more stickiness with multiple products by using brilliant account management is really one of the most mission-critical things for the B2B business.
One of the consequences of this is that we're now stepping up investments in CPaaS, in IoT, in cloud, and of course, in sales force scaling. The next area that I wanna talk about, which is the fourth area, is really a radical reset of experience. We believe that we have to fix our problems structurally and really fix this once and for all in order to reset experience. We've identified 30,000 catch...
3,000 catchments across our 150 cities to dramatically improve network experience using digital tools. What are we doing here? I think the first thing that we're doing is we are revamping all our customer journeys. This is based on a lot of feedback and on a lot of work with customers in the way that they process some of our digital tools. The second area is really transparent communication.
You'll recall that many years ago we launched Open Network. We are elevating Open Network now to really be extremely transparent with customers in terms of when we fail, because we believe that a moment of failure is a moment of opportunity for us to learn and get better. The third area that we have really picked up is raising our digital velocity.
As we built a digital business over the last, three to four years and built the digital capabilities, one of the challenges is that oftentimes we write multiple code or the same code for different lines of business. One of the things that we're doing now is to move away from a product-centric, single line of business approach to a platform approach for both experience as well as digital monetization.
Let me give you three examples of this. The first example is the data mesh. We have 100 petabytes of data now in one platform, which is being brought together for one future-proof customer lifecycle management system across Airtel. This helps our core business, but it also helps partnerships. For example, financial services and lending. A second example is channels.
Now, any channel interaction, whether it's a social media, whether it's an app, a call center, a store, a retail, a retail outlet, we look at these interactions through the lens of one customer and structurally fixing our problems. The third example I want to talk about is commerce. Search, buying, and delivery can be anytime and anywhere across any channel, and we have to find ways to actually have simple fulfillment.
One of the major capabilities that we're building is around commerce. These are three critical platforms: interactions, data mesh, and search, and commerce, which we're using to radically reset experience. The last focus area for us is really to reset margin waste. We've seen in the last 12 months a lot of headwinds on cost. Energy prices have gone up. Our deployment is going up.
We are concerned on the increased sales costs and sales and distribution costs that we've seen. One of the things that we have now looked at in the company is to really relaunch our network waste program and re-look at every cost item. Let me give you one example. We've identified 18,470 odd sites which are high-cost sites. These are sites for legacy reasons. There's an extraordinary amount of diesel that's consumed.
There's an extraordinary amount of over-engineering that may have been done on the site. Layers that we've actually deployed there, the rentals that we pay. Each of these sites is being surveyed, and we're finding unique solutions to try and lower that cost base. This will happen in the next 6-9 months. The second example, of course, is sales cost.
As I mentioned, we're concerned on the rising sales cost. We need more science to tap into lower cost channels, and we're looking at how do we do that across the company. The third example on relooking at network waste is really CapEx. We're seeing already about 11% of our devices, smartphone devices that are already 5G ready.
If you look at an individual customer on a particular site that has 5G, about 25%-35% of traffic is already getting offloaded on 5G from 4G consumption. 5G could be a capacity offload of 4G. Therefore, one of the things that we're looking at is to squeeze out our 4G capacity investments and direct this towards the future of where technology is going, which is really 5G.
To sum up, I think, the quarter has had a strong performance. We've seen strong operating cash flows. The performance has been consistent over several quarters. We're pleased that we've gained market share across all our segments, whether it's wireless, broadband, B2B or DTH, and pretty much to reach lifetime highs in terms of market shares everywhere. More importantly, our effort is to build a future-proof Airtel that has a resilient portfolio with solid capabilities. With this, let me open up to Q&A.
Thank you very much, sir. We will now begin the Q&A interactive session. For all the participants, please note that the Q&A session will be restricted to analyst and investor community. Due to time constraint, we would request if you could limit the number of questions to two per participants to enable more participation. Interested participant may click on raise hand option on Zoom application to join the Q&A queue.
Upon announcement of name, participant to kindly click on Unmute Myself in the pop-up on screen and start asking the question post introduction. First question comes from Mr. Manish Adukia. Mr. Adukia, you may please unmute your side, introduce yourself and ask your question now.
Hi. Good afternoon. Thank you so much for taking my questions. My first question is on the 4G subscriber additions, Gopal, which you talked about in your opening remarks as well, quite strong at about 6 million on a quarter-on-quarter basis, and this is against the backdrop of declining smartphone additions or shipments in the industry.
Can you maybe give us a little bit more color in terms of what is driving this? Is there mostly market share gain? Because when you talk about upgrades, wondering how upgrades are happening, you know, despite, let's say, low smartphone additions. That would be first question. Related to that, you spoke about 5G, and now it's been a few months since you started rolling out 5G.
Are you seeing any trends of, you know, consumers upgrading to higher packs, which is leading to ARPU accretion or any, let's say, incremental revenue opportunity? My second question would be on the entry-level pricing that you talked about mid, late last year.
Again, what was the thought process behind such a sharp price increase? We've not seen that magnitude of price increase from you in the past. Again, if you can maybe help us give some color, what the churn has been like and, you know, what are you expecting in terms of overall outcome from that'll be great. Thank you.
Yeah, I think, 4G net additions are, have been reasonably good for us, 6.5 million. That is on account of a combination of upgrades as well as the intensity of the rural rollout that we began last quarter. On 5G, we have seen. I don't think we can, kinda, comment on any trends on upgrades or ARPU accretion. It's too premature.
That's why I mentioned that we are seeing some traffic offload from 4G to 5G. If you're putting in CapEx, you may as well put it in to serve a future technology, which is what we wanna drive. On the entry-level plan, you know, the way we see it is that this plan actually gives you a lot more value.
For customers, some customers sort of buy 1.4, 1.5 packs of, you know, the major packs, and we wanted to simplify the portfolio and keep it with significantly greater value. We've seen good results. Both Haryana and Odisha met action standards.
The churn that we were expecting was lower than what we thought it would be, and this is what's prompted us to take it across 17 circles. As you know, Haryana is a little bit more of a competitive market. Odisha is a market which is really a two-player market in effect because the third player has less than 4% revenue market share. That's really the way we see it.
Sure. Maybe just a follow-on question to that. You've started raising prices at the entry level, which in some ways seems a bit counterintuitive. Why not also do that for, let's say, the smartphone or the postpaid user base? Do you think that the price level around that also could see some kind of movement? I mean, I'm just trying to understand the thought process behind starting from the entry level and not from, let's say, the higher-end customer base.
This is the one plan that we had, which was a very odd plan, which is a metered plan. The reason we focused on it. You know, this is really largely used by either customers who've got a smartphone and are buying a second SIM.
In a way, there's a choice here to consolidate the SIM and then some feature phone users, for whom we are doing a lot of... This is a point at which the premiums went up to almost 3.5 to 4, and we saw a serious decline in postpaid or a serious softness on postpaid. Today, that ratio has come back to 1.6 to 1.7. I think you are broader, and therefore we are expecting and hope that using 5G we can actually see stronger growth in postpaid.
The broader point of actually tariff increases across the industry is a valid point, and that has to go up as we've always mentioned. It's just that we can't do this unilaterally, and if we did it and lost market share, then to claw that market share back would actually be far more difficult. In the case of the entry-level plan, it was a calculated bet, which is why we took it in 2 small circles representing more or less the country. Given that the results were ahead of our action standards, we decided to roll it out as well.
Sure. Thank you so much for taking my questions. All the best.
Thank you, Mr. Adukia. The next question comes from Mr. Sanjesh Jain. Mr. Jain, you may please unmute your side, introduce yourself, and ask your question now.
Sorry, this is Arun from Avendus. Hello? Gopal, my question is on first on CapEx. We see sequentially there is an increase in the Cap... Hello? Hope you are able to hear me.
Yeah. We lost you for a moment, Arun.
Okay.
I just heard CapEx. Yeah.
Right. Right. Gopal, sequentially, we see increase in the mobile services, India CapEx. I think, we are, your kind of indication was that 5G CapEx will be replacing 4G, all along. Is this something that is, that has happened in this quarter as a something on off? Or is we are yet to switch off the 4G CapEx? How should we look at the CapEx figures for this quarter?
No, I think that this, we are in the midst of a big 5G rollout, as you're aware. We've always mentioned that while we don't give CapEx guidance, we've always mentioned that if you take a three-year view, then, you know, the moderate or the CapEx that we normally spend, which is, in a per year,
If you look at the India business alone, about INR 25,000 odd crores, you extrapolate that for three years, we do not expect any significant change to that overall level of CapEx over a three-year period. However, what we do believe is that we may advance some of this CapEx into the early years because it's just moving forward the CapEx that would anyway have been incurred over a three-year period. That's the way I would suggest we should, you know, that's the way we think about it and that is how we look at it.
What I understand is you are front-loading certain CapEx in this.
Yeah. We've always mentioned this, that you might see an elevation in a, in a given year. You know, we've seen an elevation right now because we are in the midst of a 5G rollout. We're also in the midst of a rural rollout. We have launched the Gujarat sub-gigahertz, which is now a project that is concluded. All of that, I think, would have led to an advancing of the CapEx. The fact is that if you take a three-year view, then the CapEx would be more or less in the same ballpark. You may have an advancing in a given year, in the early years.
Right. Gopal, my second question is on your comment, opening comments or remarks regarding the rural expansion across at least 60,000 villages, high-profile villages, just this coinciding with your increase in the minimum pricing plan.
One would think that if you are entering new geographies especially where you are not present, probably you will have certain other plans which will make easy for the new customers to hop onto your network. Is it, isn't it, there is a dichotomy in the way your your pricing action is saying and how you are saying you will expand in the coming quarters?
No, there's no dichotomy because remember the entry-level plan of INR 99 is really largely a, just a minutes plan with a very marginal amount of data, barely 100 MB or 200 MB. Really the way we think of the entry-level plan is INR 155, which is where you get 2 GB of data. The real data starts kicking only at about INR 140.
In these villages, there's only one competitor. If you look at that competitor, the entry-level plans for that competitor is also INR 155. This is a fight for 4G customers and less to do with 2G, which is at that entry-level price point. It's a very simple game of really expanding into areas to take to win share of smartphones. I think that's really where we are, we are focused.
Right. Right. Okay. Just my last question on this-
Arun, that plays squarely into our strategy, which we've talked about is really quality customers. That is really where we go.
Right. Thanks, Gopal. That's just one last question on the spectrum side. In 2021 auction, you kind of filled your gaps in the sub-gigahertz portfolio, by acquiring some spectrum in few circles in 800 and 900 as well. How is your experience post that? Do you see a remarkable increase in the retention of the customers in those circles? What are the learnings from that?
Well, you know, sub-gigahertz is always a precious spectrum because it has better coverage, more propagation. We get improved propagation in villages. Let's say for example, if you're on an 1800 grid, and on that same tower, if you put in sub-gigahertz on the same tower, then you get a little bit more coverage in rural areas.
That's one advantage. The second is in our cities, where through sub-gigahertz you're able to penetrate indoor better than what you would do on 1800. In most cases, our entire network topology itself was planned on the basis of 1800. With 1800 band, you still have some of these constraints on indoor coverage and so on and so forth.
I think we've seen good evidence to suggest that customers are, you know, more pleased, which is measured through the number of complaints or interactions that happen. That creates greater stickiness for those customers in the cities. We are also able to go and win more customers in some of the rural areas where sub-gigahertz would be now present.
Right. Don't you think that is something we can replicate with more sub-gigahertz spectrum in 700 as well? Because if you have seen success in the past-
No, no, Arun. sub-gigahertz only gives you coverage. Remember, you know, there are 2 parts to mobile networks. There is coverage and there is capacity. Capacity is really given through mid-band because the amount of spectrum in the sub-gigahertz band is very limited. For example, there are circles in India where we have 10 megahertz of sub-gigahertz.
The relative difference between 10 and 5 is almost in the zone of indifference. The real difference is between 0 and 5. Therefore, sub-gigahertz you don't need too much because whether you have 5 megahertz or 10 megahertz, the incremental experience that you get at the far edge will move from, let's say, 2 Mbps to 3 or 3 and a half Mbps. It will not get to 10 or 20 Mbps. For that, you need the mid-band spectrum. When I say mid-band, I'm talking about all the mid-bands, including 18, 2100, 23 and sub, and the sub-six, which is 3.5 gigahertz.
Okay. If I understand right, what you're saying is the marginal utility of the incremental sub-gigahertz spectrum, you don't see value at this point of time.
Yeah.
Yeah. Thanks. Thanks, Gopal.
I'm saying at any point in time, because it doesn't give you capacity, it only gives you coverage.
Right. Right. Thanks. Thanks, Gopal. All the best.
Thank you, Mr. Vasant. The next question comes from Mr. Sanjesh Jain. Mr. Jain, you may please unmute your side, introduce yourself, and ask your question now. The next question comes from Mr. Piyush Choudhary. Mr. Choudhary, you may please unmute your side, introduce yourself, and ask your question now.
Yeah. Hi. Good afternoon. Thanks for the call. I have two questions. Firstly, Gopal, you mentioned about towns covered with 5G rollout, right? If you want to measure what % of your network is fired up with 5G signal, could you quantify that? What is the target of your network footprint, which will be fired with 5G signal by March 2024?
Could you also comment on the pace of 5G handset adoption? Is it slower than your base case estimate? Has it changed any of your business plan for 5G rollout? Second is, you talked about future of Airtel, can you share how you're thinking about 5G FWA business model among the future of Airtel? Like, what are the key bottlenecks over there? What we need to watch, which could change your, you know, business plan regarding 5G FWA? Thank you.
Thank you, Piyush. I think that, you know, I mean, the, the answer to your first question is rather complex to answer that, because we don't want to put in 5G where there is no, where there are no smartphones, where there's very limited traffic. This is not a ubiquitous layer.
Remember, even on 5G, even today as we speak, if you've got a 5G phone like I do, for example, I see a 5G logo. When I do a speed test, I'm seeing 400, 500 Mbps. If I'm actually using it for my applications, which is browsing or video or mail or social media, whatever it is, then I see no palpable difference really between 5G and 4G.
The reason for that is that 4 to 8 Mbps, if you're getting 4 to 8 Mbps, all of these applications work really well. The video doesn't browse or the video doesn't open up and play any faster on 500 Mbps than 4 to 8 Mbps. I mean, the zone of indifference is high. Therefore, the real question is that at this point, one of the big use cases on 5G is a capacity offload.
We will certainly go where the traffic of 4G is high. The second point I do wanna make is that we're seeing a 30% incremental coverage. Just to give you an example, in the area that we are in just now in Gurgaon, around the area from my residence to the office, we have about 35 sites of 4G.
We get a very similar experience across all 35 sites with a fraction of the sites that we today have. We are interested in coverage and less to do with sites. That is one of the ways that we are actually looking at. There are 2 factors we're looking at. 1 is coverage, and the other is a capacity offload.
The pace of 5G handset adoption is right now still sitting at about 35%-40% of shipments. Today, there are about 11% of our devices that are 5G enabled. We expect this to climb, and by March 2024 to get to our 20%+. We are doing our several experiments on fixed wireless. 1 of the constraints or 1 of the challenges that you have is that the router cost of fixed wireless is quite high today.
The router cost is anywhere between $180-$200. If you look at a cost per home pass, today it's about $25-$30. If you take a utilization rate of about 30%-32%, then cost per connected home pass is about $100, and you still need a home router in both the situations. The cost for connected home for a fixed wireless access, given the router that you need or that the CPE that you need, let's call it the CPE, the customer premises equipment, is almost double that of a fiber that is rolled straight to the home today.
We do believe that this cost will come down over time. There are... One of the things that we're looking at is actually working on fixed wireless access, intending to try out some pilots, and then being ready in the next six months.
Thanks, Gopal. Just to follow up over there, given you mentioned that capacity offload is the, one of the prime use cases-
At this point in time. Of course, there are other use cases. Sorry, Yush, I must qualify that.
Yeah.
At this point in time, it's capacity offload. B2B is another place where we are looking at other use cases. We just won a big deal with one of our customers on a private network, we are looking at other areas around B2B. There are aspects around edge cloud and so on, which is another area that will happen. If I look at the overall innovation ecosystem to drive 5G use cases, particularly when it comes to low latency applications, globally, these use cases are still few and far between.
Yeah. my question was if the handset penetration or adoption rate remains below your kind of base case estimate, would it lead to lower coverage rollout also in terms of 5G?
you know, when I say that there are 11% of devices that are 5G ready already, if you take markets like Delhi, that 11% is not 40%. That 11% may be 14%, 15%. If you look at a market like Bihar, it could be about 8%, 9%. If you start going deeper into rural areas, maybe it's at 4%-5%. It'll all happen.
It's just that we have to look at where the devices are or where they're likely to come over the next 6-9 months and plan our rollout in addition to the coverage that we will provide wherever we need to go, whichever cities that we've decided to go. I think the rollout is gonna happen across urban India by March 2024.
The pace of the rollout beyond urban India is something that will be dictated by how 5G devices shape up.
Got it. Thanks a lot.
Thank you, Mr. Chaudhry. The next question comes from Mr. Sanjesh Jain. Mr. Jain, you may please unmute your side, introduce yourself, and ask your question.
Hello. Thanks for the opportunity. First on the, on the enterprise side, Gopal, you mentioned that 50 of the top 500 account have grown by 300%. That's a staggering number. What is driving such a strong growth in these 50 account? Can it be replicable? As in, are we looking at an opportunity in the enterprise which can grow up by multifold than what we are today? And also the services which you think where we are well placed to capitalize this. That would be my first question.
Yeah, that's a great question. I think if you recall, I don't know if you remember about a year ago, we had kicked this off. At that point I talked about 2 examples where we had grown dramatically. We did try and then take this across the entire 500 accounts, which is what led to our strategy of going wide and going deep.
Of the 500 we've made success in 50, or we've had success in 50. We do need to make it more repeatable and extend it across. What is driving this? I think there are various things that drive it. One is the, you know, a natural tailwind of consolidating spends behind fewer suppliers or behind fewer partners, provided there is redundancy.
That redundancy can be provided through more sophisticated technologies such as software-defined wide area networks. This is one trend that we see. The second is bringing the full power of Airtel, which is across both our global business as well as our domestic business to actually address the customer's needs.
That comes down to the third thing, which is really having a very strong account plan for every single account. This requires a tremendous amount of skilling of our sales force. One of the things that we've done is created virtual teams. For example, there's a virtual team for banking and financial services. There's a virtual team for IT/ITeS. There's a virtual team with a virtual project or team leader for manufacturing and distribution.
We have de-layered the organization, where the large accounts directly, the account managers directly report in to, you know, our domestic enterprise head who's actually focused on these 500 accounts.
That's the third area. The fourth area is actually finding more innovation, more capabilities around some of the adjacencies, where particularly things like CPaaS, which are seeing strong growth, data centers and cloud, where we have not made as much headway because we haven't yet been able to create as much of capabilities there.
This is an area that we believe we need to step up our investment because that market is very large. Just to give you a sense, the connectivity market is as large or the adjacency market is as large as the connectivity market.
In the connectivity segment we have a large share, but in the adjacencies we have a much smaller share. The headroom for growth, is really restricted only by our own imagination and ability to execute, which is really all around creation of those capabilities. That is the reason why, I do believe it's a repeatable model. It's a repeatable model. It's not easy. A lot of heavy lifting will need to be done, but this is really the effort.
Thanks, Gopal. That's quite detailed. Just to follow on, X of Y, because that's declining and that's somewhat distorting the number. Sustainably a 20% growth for next 5 year, considering that 5G will also add to the use case, in the enterprise, is something you think is a possible scenario or you think that will be a fast-fitted function?
I'm not gonna give you a number because then you'll ask me, you know, an update against that and make it a target for me.
No, no. It was not a guidance.
I do want to just call your attention, Sanjesh, to the growth that we have seen in this business. If you go back 3 years ago, the growth in this business was 7%-8%. 8% has gone to 12%, and 12% now has gone to close to 14%-15%. The business has seen a step up in growth. That is based on the past track record. It's not that, you know, all of this has begun only in the last 3, 4 months, but it's something that we've consistently sorted, right?
Fair enough. Fair enough. One follow-up on the CapEx. Last quarter, we called out that we have given an advance of INR 50 billion, this quarter, the CapEx looks INR 93 billion. Compulsory, if I look at the BTS addition, it's still on the normal run rate of 18,700. We had some acceleration in fiber.
That's not material. Is it that we are buying more equipment for the future deployment and hence there is an up-fronting of CapEx in this quarter? How should one look at BTS growth from here on? Probably an adjacent question, on the cost side, how should this drive cost both on the power side as well as on the, on the rental side? What should be the cost inflation on the network OpEx from here on because of this?
Sanjesh, what we have seen is that, firstly, you know, you won't get a new site addition with 5G because 5G is being sprung on an existing site. Just a baseband or a base station that gets sprung onto an existing site. We will see a increase in the amount of sites that we roll out on the rural front. 5G has been one of the things that we have certainly up-fronted. Y
ou know, we are obviously, as you put in more infrastructure on the side, you do get a headwind in terms of cost, which is why the power and waste program has been set up. I would say that we have the most power efficient solution in the NSA technology that we've deployed. Shamim, I don't know if you want to add anything?
Yeah. Our power and waste program is being stepped up because with the rural rollout as well as with the 5G rollout, there will be a creep up on network cost. We are working towards it, and the impact will certainly get minimized through those efforts. Overall OpEx, there won't be. Again, I cannot give a guidance, but overall it will be equal to or lower than this.
Fair enough. Fair enough. A site I could understand, Gopal, the BTS additions should drive, right? For 3,500 we need to deploy an additional BTS. I'm telling BTS addition has also been a normalized run rate this quarter.
I'll take that. Sanjesh, it is not relevant because the way we calculate our base stations, that would not be always relevant, because 5G would be an additional antenna which will be strung onto.
Fair enough. Fair enough. I will take this up finally, to understand it better.
Yeah, sure.
Thank you very much, Gopal and Soumen, for all those answers.
Thank you, Mr. Jain. The next question comes from Mr. Shubham Goyal. Mr. Goyal, you may please unmute your side, introduce yourself and ask your question.
Good afternoon. Hello, am I audible?
Yeah.
Yes, sir. I just wanted to ask that about the product base to platform base. I didn't quite understand what do you mean by that?
Let me explain. Let me give you just one example. You know, search and buy, which is really what we call as our commerce platform, is applicable to all our businesses, which is whether it's wireless, broadband, it's DTH, it's B2B. Indeed, it is not just our businesses but also to our partners.
Now you have two choices. What do I mean by a product business? A product approach is when you are creating those bespoke journeys for individual lines of business. Which means you're writing the code for wireless. If you're doing an integration with another business, then you rewrite that code. That is on account of. Most telcos have this problem.
In fact, most traditional companies, legacy companies who've grown up with older systems over 20 years have this problem, where underlying billing systems don't talk to each other and they're complex. We have created a layer on top through an API platform, which is able to extract some of that complexity and simplify it.
What we're now doing is actually creating a single platform on search and buy, which will be federated across all our businesses. As a consequence of which, we will have a uniform experience across businesses, and more importantly, we will have greater digital velocity to drive into our business. That's what I mean by platforms. This is one of the things that most mature digital organizations go through. They move away more and more from products to platforms. It's not that Products give you agility.
When you're doing something for an individual line of business, it gives you greater agility. I think we're now in a situation where with the capabilities that we've built, we can indeed get more velocity through a more simplified approach to driving what we're calling platform centric build.
Okay. This will lead to operational efficiency, right?
It will lead to operational efficiency. It will lead to our ability to give better experience. For example, it will also lead to some better growth, like when you get a lead, you know, converting that lead from a lead directly into what is possible to deliver to a broadband customer, and then having it delivered to an installation engineer. All of that is digitally orchestrated, and it'll be much quicker and much more seamless.
Okay, sir. Thank you.
Thank you, Mr. Goyal The next question comes from Mr. Mohit Motwani. Mr. Motwani, you may please unmute your side, introduce yourself and ask your question.
Hi. Thanks for the opportunity. And congratulations for a good set of numbers. I just have one question on the rights issue, which we have, around INR 15,000 crores, which is yet to be called. With the kind of good free cash flows that you are generating, and you are doing the CapEx from the internal accruals itself, is there any timeframe when you expect this rights issue pending to be called?
Ajit, do you wanna take it?
Sure. Thanks, Gopal. Mohit, you're right. I think the pending calls are available for few quarters more. At this stage, you're right also that with the free cash flow profile, there may not necessarily be immediate visibility of the same. But I think from where we are, it's useful to keep that product alive and maybe over the coming few quarters we can re-benchmark when is the effective need for the balance call.
Got it. Thank you so much for that.
Thank you, Mr. Motwani. The next question comes from Mr. Avishek Datta. Mr. Datta, you may please unmute your side, introduce yourself and ask your question.
Hello, sir. Great performance. Just wanted to understand this, prepaid plan, entry plan, which you have got. What percentage of the customer base currently accounts for this plan across 22 circles?
I don't think we report out our individual plans and how many customers are there. We have a, you know, a reasonably large base of feature phone users that... and you know those numbers.
Let me just give you a little bit of texture to this so that it just helps you in the way that you model. You know, every prepaid customer doesn't necessarily recharge at the end of the 28th day or the 56th day or the 84th day when their recharge cycle expires or their validity ends. As you start going down the lower end, people recharge less and less frequently.
One of the things that you have to look at is we have a definition within to really look at how many customers are really live on the network at a given point in time. That number is really what we look at when we look at some of these plans.
The second point I do wanna make is that the revenue contribution of customers who are only on 2G device is much smaller than the customer contribution of 2G customers on our network. If you take our total revenue on a customer base, take out the 4G customers and look at the balances to 2G, you'll find the revenue contribution is actually much lower.
While around 33% is your non data customers. The share of the entry level plan will be in 15%-20%. Around 15% is what we can safely take?
I leave it to you. I think it'll probably be a little bit more than that, but, I mean, I think, you know. We don't have the exact numbers to share with you here.
We can expect this plan to be rolled out across 22 circles pretty soon?
We've rolled it out across 17, and we've not rolled it into a few Circles. They were relatively weaker, so we've not rolled it there.
Okay. Thank you.
Thank you, Mr. Datta. With this, I would now hand over the proceedings to Mr. Gopal Vittal for closing remarks.
Again, I wanna thank you for joining in. I really appreciate this, thank you for all your questions. I think, I do wanna underscore that, you know, just to sum up, broadly our performance has been consistent.
All our businesses are at lifetime high in terms of revenue market shares. I think the headway or the headroom for growth is strong given our rural rollout as well as the top 150 cities. There are other areas that we are working on in order to build a future-proof Airtel. Again, thank you, and see you next time.
Thank you everyone for joining us today.
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