Post the management opening remarks, we will open up for an interactive Q&A session. Interested participants may click on Raise Hand option on the Zoom application to join the Q&A queue. The participants may click this option during the management opening remarks itself to ensure they find a place in the queue. Upon announcement of name, participants to kindly click on Unmute Myself in the pop-up screen and start asking the question post-introduction. With this, I would like to hand over to Mr. Soumen Ray for his opening remarks.
Thank you, Vaidehi. Welcome to the Q4 FY 2026 earnings call of Bharti Airtel Limited. I have with me Gopal, Shashwat, Akhil and Navan. Pleased to inform you that today we will have Mr. Sunil Bharti Mittal, Chairman, Bharti Airtel Limited, joining us for the last 10-15 minutes of the webinar to address queries relating to promoter shareholding. I will now start with an update on our consolidated financials for the fourth quarter and full year ended FY 2026, post which I will hand over to Shashwat to talk about our India business, including the strategic priorities. First, a quick roundup on FY 2026. We delivered another year of strong performance. Our consolidated revenue crossed another milestone and came in at a lifetime high of about INR 211,000 crores, backed by strong performance in both India and Africa.
EBITDA came in at about INR 1,08,000 crore with a margin of 51.2%. India EBITDA, excluding passive, came in at about INR 7,272,500 crore, growing around 18% and delivered a 3.1% improvement and stood at 51.7%. Our sustained operational excellence is underpinned by our portfolio premiumization, sharp execution and tight control over cost through war on waste initiatives. CapEx for FY 2026 for India, excluding passive, was around INR 31,000 crore. Operating free cash flow, which is EBITDA minus CapEx, was a solid INR 41,500 crore+. Disciplined capital spending and operational excellence continue to strengthen our balance sheet. Net debt to EBITDA now stands at 1.1. The board recommended a dividend of INR 24 per share, a significant increase over last year's INR 16 per share.
This is in line with our stated philosophy of progressive increase in payouts. Let me now turn to our Q4 performance. Consolidated revenues came in at about INR 55,400 crores, a growth of 2.6% sequentially. Africa maintained its underlying growth trajectory. Q4 constant currency revenue growth was at 1.1% and was impacted by seasonality as well as lesser number of days. Currency tailwinds further supported growth in reported currency. India revenues, excluding passive, came in at about INR 36,100 crores. EBITDA margins came in at about 52%, an improvement of 20 basis points. Let me now talk about the strength of our diversified portfolio and an update on our new growth bets. Our diversified and resilient portfolio continues to play well. Underlying performance across India and Africa was strong.
Africa now accounts for 29% of revenues, India mobile 52%, India non-mobile at 13% and Indus at 6%. Our investments are directed towards future-proofing Airtel by building world-class digital network, sharpening the core portfolio and scaling new digital growth engines. Our strategy to further diversify our portfolio is reflected through investments in new growth bets. Let me spend a few minutes on the same. Over the year, through a very disciplined approach, we have identified new areas, which we call adjacencies, and operated calibrated experimentation on them. To us, adjacencies means the business must pass two filters. First, we have a proven right to win, and second, we can create a differentiated value proposition. We have sharpened our focus, this is the result of the experimentation, in three specific adjacencies. These are data centers, financial services, and Airtel Cloud.
In data centers, we continue to make steady progress against our ambition of building 1 GW capacity over the next few years. To augment this journey, Nxtra announced a $1 billion fundraise from marquee investors alongside participation from Airtel. We see this as a strong validation of both the scale of the opportunity and our execution capabilities in this business. In financial services, we reached an important milestone with our subsidiary, Airtel Money Limited, receiving the Reserve Bank of India's approval to operate as a non-deposit taking non-banking financial company. We are now progressing towards commercial launch. Over the last three years, we have built a strong foundation as a loan service provider, serving customers' need through digital-first solutions. Our loan service provider business continues to deliver strong growth with monthly loan disbursement run rate now over INR 550 crores.
What gives us confidence here is the combination of our digital platform, data and analytics capabilities, and strong operating discipline. Together, these position us well to expand access to simple, secure, and innovative financial services at scale. Within our financial service portfolio, Airtel Payments Bank delivered another quarter of strong performance. It ended Q4 with monthly transacting users of about 120 million. Annualized revenue run rate is now about INR 3,400 crores, growing 23% YoY. Deposit remains strong at over INR 4,600 crores, growing at 27% YoY. In Airtel Cloud, our telco-grade sovereign cloud offering is seeing encouraging traction. We ended the year with securing 24 deals, followed by further wins in April, and we are currently in conversation with multiple customers across industries.
We have also made very good progress in building attributes and credentials required by our customers in this business. In these new growth bets, we are still in early days, but we are encouraged by the progress, confident in the opportunities ahead, and committed to building these businesses with the same discipline, customer centricity, and long-term focus that have shaped Airtel's journey so far. Now, an update on Group synergies. We are working on various areas, including technology, network, supply chain, and talent across the group. Initial outcomes are extremely encouraging and moving as per our plan. Our tech stack has already been extended to Africa, Payments Bank, and Indus Towers at arm's-length pricing. This gives significant leverage across the group to shorten the learning curve, drive cost effectiveness, and accelerate digital ways of working to drive growth.
In addition, we have taken B2B and homes as two areas for massive synergy. Within this, we are working towards significantly reducing dependence of diesel by transitioning towards high-powered batteries and renewable power. We strongly believe that work across these areas will provide meaningful outcomes with superior revenue growth and cost efficiencies. Moving to the material transaction that was approved by the board to acquire additional stake in our Africa operations. The board yesterday approved a share swap transaction between Airtel and ICIL to acquire additional 16.3% in Airtel Africa. We continue to remain confident about the long-term growth opportunity in Africa, led by low tele-density at about 45% on unique SIMs, smartphone penetrations of only about 52%, very low data consumption per customer, and overall young demographic profile of the market.
Further, there are two large growth opportunities, the first one being homes, enterprise, and data centers, and the second being Airtel Money, where there is a potential for further value unlock with listing. This is a no-cash deal and value accretive to Airtel shareholders. Before I hand over to Shashwat, I would also like to talk about the impact of the ongoing geopolitical crisis.
There are a few areas of our operations which are seeing impact, including international roaming, CapEx on account of INR depreciation, restriction on gas supply affecting galvanizing industry, in turn leading to lower tower build-outs. The other obvious impact is energy price increase. Africa has already been impacted by it. Having said that, we are looking at all possible opportunities to mitigate the impact with amplified efforts through our War on Waste initiatives. With this, I will now hand over to Shashwat for an update on India business.
Thank you, Soumen. Very good afternoon to everyone. I'll start by sharing an update on our ESG plans, followed by each of our business segments, and then our strategic priorities. Let me start with ESG. Our ESG progress is anchored in our strategy and in the way we leverage technology and digital innovation to drive sustainable operations with enhanced efficiency. A key focus area is increasing the use of energy from alternate to renewable sources. This is reflected in our continued expansion of solar power deployment across our network infrastructure. We ended the year with 42,000 network sites which have solar access. Over the last two years, we have solarized nearly 27,000 network sites. We've also made significant progress on workforce diversity. Women contribute to over 20% of our workforce today, improving from 11% that we had in 2023.
This is not enough. We believe that we must continue the work much more to improve our women representation in our workforce. Moving on to a quick update on each of our businesses, and let me start first by rounding up the year gone by. We delivered strong performance across our businesses. Mobility sustained revenue market share gains to reach a lifetime high share. Homes accelerated strongly this year, adding 4.2 million customers, while B2B further strengthened its market share in core connectivity and delivered strong outcomes in its digital businesses. Our IPTV launch last year was well received with encouraging customer adoption. We continue to invest in digital infrastructure, deploying nearly 7,800 more network sites and rolling out nearly 43,000 km of fiber. Fiber deployment remains a strategic priority for us, and I'll come back to this shortly.
Underpinning this, our digital-first approach and relentless focus on serving customers better every day. FY 2026 was a landmark year for us. We continued to deliver strong performance and seeded three new digital growth engines that we believe will drive the long-term growth of the company. Let me now turn to the quarterly performance of the business segments for quarter four. Mobile, we added 4.7 million customers in quarter four and 5.8 million out of those were smartphone customers. Our ARPU for the quarter came in at INR 257, which on an EBITDA basis was an increase of INR 3 for the quarter. We are not happy with the ARPU increase of INR 3. Part of this issue was linked to West Asia crisis and international roaming revenues. We are now determined to doubling down on all our levers on ARPU and growing and accelerating this pace.
Homes, we continue to deliver another strong quarter. Our net adds came in at 1.1 million. While FWA continued to expand the addressable market for us, we are deepening our footprint on FTTH with accelerated home pass expansion. Digital TV saw a turnaround. We added nearly 500,000 customers during the quarter, led by the IPTV adoption. Our IPTV take rates continue to improve and are delivering on our converged agenda on content. Airtel Business revenue came in at about INR 5,500 crores, growing 2.6% sequentially. We ended the year on a strong note with a healthy order book and a funnel across domestic and global business with multiple wins from large enterprises. During the quarter, we secured multiple deals on IoT, security, cloud, core connectivity, and Nxtra.
We ended the year with a strong order book growth of 17% in FY 2026. Digital businesses delivered a strong revenue growth for us at growing at 27% in FY 2026. We continue to strengthen our offerings through strategic investments across our digital portfolio, spanning cloud, cybersecurity, financial services, IoT, digital platforms, and CPaaS. These investments are enabling us to build scalable enterprise-grade digital capabilities and diversify our revenue mix. Let me now move to our strategic pillars and start with quality customers. Starting with homes, I had mentioned earlier, we see a large opportunity with market potential of nearly 100 million connected homes over the medium term in India. Growing smart TV penetration, evolving content consumption behaviors of consumers, and the growing need for reliable and secure home connectivity are driving a very strong demand well beyond key urban centers.
Given the global environment, there has been challenge on this business with memory and chipset supply as well as prices. Given this scenario and the fact that fiber offers the superior experience and reliable connectivity to our customers, we have doubled down on all our efforts to grow our fiber business. In FY 2026, we rolled out upwards of 8 million home passes to cross 45 million home passes, and we continue to expand rapidly. Another area where we see growth is driving fixed and mobile convergence. We have seen converging Wi-Fi and mobile for our customers drops their churn by nearly 50%. We are determined to leveraging our existing relationships with high-value customers and scale our converge base. We have taken a step in this direction through our recently launched One Airtel plans, which offer customers convenience, flexibility of bundling, as well as great value.
Let me now switch to mobile. The focus on mobile is to dramatically accelerate our ARPU growth in the business. Overall upgradation with data consumption and 5G, handset upgrades from feature phones and international roaming offer large headrooms for growth. We see a very large opportunity in upgradation to postpaid and are determined to accelerating postpaid growth by driving differentiation. Our rural network expansion program continues and contributes significantly to our growth momentum. Let me now turn to B2B. Majority of incremental growth for the industry in B2B is coming from adjacencies, including cloud, security, IoT, CPaaS, data centers. Core connectivity growth is moderate. We continue to grow competitively. To capitalize on the growth opportunity, we are focusing on three key areas.
First is to build a gold standard infrastructure with low latency flapless fiber networks, sub, deeper subsea cables presence across the globe, augment DC to DC connectivity and expand our OPGW infrastructure. Over the last three years, we have deployed over INR 1 lakh 43,000 km of fiber, and we believe the pace of deployment should continue to address the growing customer needs across, as well as in future-proofing Airtel itself. The other area we need to strengthen is our digital portfolio capabilities while building a world-class delivery and assurance organization. We are developing comprehensive suite of digital services to deepen and sharpen our portfolio across cloud, IoT, cybersecurity, CPaaS, and SD-WAN. We are strengthening our account management capabilities to deliver superior customer experience supported by digital tooling and data science platforms. The second pillar of our strategy is the obsession to deliver brilliant experience.
Delivering an exceptional experience to our customers remains paramount to us and underpins everything we do, from network investments to digital innovations. Our converged data engine that powers digital experience layer is accelerating our ways of working and enabling deeper customer engagement through persuasion and contextual marketing. Our network priorities are towards building a gold-plated experience, and we are investing in strengthening our transport layer and launching advanced capabilities on 5G. Our 5G network is now fully SA ready. FWA is running fully on SA, while mobile customers are transitioning in a phased manner. We continue to refine our digital tools and depth of data science to improve our experience and reduce customer churn. Customer obsession is deeply embedded in our culture that we have built over the years, and this is anchored in two core beliefs: ownership mindset and entrepreneurial spirit.
Embodying this philosophy, we have established an annual tradition. Teams across the organization spend a day in the field with frontline colleagues, directly interacting with customers, listening to them, learning, and grasping their pain points. Every year through this initiative we gather critical insights across network, customer journeys, delivery and assurance, and many other areas. These insights help us resolve issues structurally and make our network more resilient and help us serve our customers better every day. The third pillar of our strategy is to build and leverage our digital capabilities. AI is now central to our digital agenda, and we are progressively embedding AI across our platform architecture. Let me give you some flavor of notable outcomes from AI last quarter. Our fight against spam has always been powered by AI at scale.
In quarter four, we identified an additional 14 billion spam calls and over 520 million spam messages. Our next best action AI model generated 135 million actions last quarter, which helps us accelerate our cross-sell and Wi-Fi postpaid and financial services. In Q4, we processed 375 million customer interactions with our voice AI bot and processed 256 million images using our vision AI for safety, design and workmanship. AI is contributing to nearly 30% of all code written at Airtel, but we are beginning to see meaningful impact scaling up across businesses. The last and fourth pillar of our strategy is war on waste.
As there are cost headwinds on both OpEx and CapEx, I want to underscore that we have widened the funnel to identify and eliminate waste across the organization. While unpredictable scenarios are playing out globally, the cost pressures we are seeing today remain confined to a few specific areas, particularly in servers and memory prices, as well as availability of these components. Significant steps to re-engineer and redesign are underway in the organization to mitigate these pressures. We've also taken significant steps to reduce our dependency on diesel consumption across our sites. These initiatives are beginning to deliver meaningful outcomes, and we believe there is a lot of work still to be done in the space of war on waste. To sum up, overall, we delivered another year and a quarter of strong performance underpinned by strength of our diversified portfolio and sharp execution.
Looking ahead, we continue to see large growth opportunities across mobility, led by ARPU growth through portfolio premiumization and postpaid, rapid expansion of homes and across B2B. At the same time, our investments are directed to building digital businesses and new growth bets at scale to future-proof Airtel and its long-term growth. Digital acceleration remains at the core of our strategy, with AI increasingly embedded across the businesses at scale. The strength of our balance sheet reflects our disciplined capital allocation, sustained deleveraging and operational excellence. This has enabled us to sustain a progressive dividend policy with our dividends in FY 2026 increasing by 50% over the previous year. With that summary, let me now hand it over back to Vaidehi for the Q&A session.
Thank you very much, Shashwat. We will now begin the Bharti Airtel Q&A interactive session for all the participants. Please note that the Q&A session will be restricted to the analyst and investor community only. Due to time constraints, we would request if you could limit the questions to two per participants to enable more participation. Interested participants may click on Raise Hand option on the Zoom application to join the Q&A queue. Upon announcement of name, participants to kindly click on Unmute Myself in the pop-up screen and start asking the question post-introduction. Participants are requested to limit their questions to Bharti Airtel till 1:00 P.M., as the management will start the Q&A discussion on Bharti Hexacom from 1:00 P.M. onwards. With this, the 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 for taking my questions. This is Manish Adukia from Goldman Sachs. My first question is on capital allocation. Thank you for the color around dividend payout. Now, the free cash flow you're generating in the India business, last 12 months more than $4 billion, consol business more than $5 billion of free cash flow. In the context of that free cash flow, the dividend payout is still less than about 40% of that free cash flow generation. For Africa, you've done like a share swap transaction. In the context of that large free cash flow generation over the next few years, one, how are you thinking about progressively what payout may look like in a steady state?
Two, if you can just talk about what are the other priorities in terms of assets outside of India that you may potentially look to explore in the future, given just the strong free cash flow generation, and maybe the criteria you may look to, you know, assess any asset that you may want to acquire outside India? That would be my first question, please.
Yeah, Manish, let me take that. I think the, you know, obviously, the free cash flow generation for the company has increased. That is the reason why we have sort of stepped up and also said to you in the past that there will be a progressive dividend policy, which is the reason that you've seen the step up in dividend. As far as capital allocation is concerned, I think, you know, the way we think about it is the first and primary port of call is to really invest in the core business. This is the core business in India, the core business in Africa, the core business in Indus Towers, et cetera. I think, you know, the climate stake in Africa was predicated on that assumption of really picking up a greater stake in a very valuable asset.
Where the penetration of data, tele-density, the penetration of smartphones is low. Airtel Money is a big opportunity. We are very excited about that. The second port of call is really to, you know, continue to deleverage to the extent that we need to. The third port of call is to invest in some of these adjacencies which Soumen spoke about. Data centers, you will note that, you know, despite the investments we've put in, we are a big player in the data center market. We are only at about 10%- 12% share. For a company of our size, we're not satisfied with that kind of presence.
We really need to, you know, step up our game in data centers, and our ambition is to get to a gigawatt, as we've mentioned, in a few years' time. That game will not end there. We will continue to build out. You know, the data center market has 50%-60% of its demand coming out of Mumbai, so, you know, land will need to be acquired and data centers will need to be built. Second port of call is really around financial services, and this is why we've announced our NBFC after the experiments that Soumen spoke about.
Again, we are excited about it because we believe we have a genuine moat here to really drive the business as a whole and create stickiness for our user base in a market where the penetration of financial services and lending generally is very low and the headroom for growth over the next three decades is high. Obviously, it's a business that needs to be run prudently. Collections are more important, as many of you have told us in smaller conversations, and, you know, we fully understand that. The power of our platform is showing us that the delinquencies, as well as the collection cost, as well as sales acquisition cost, are much lower than if you do it alone in a very fragmented market. That's the second port of call. The third port of call is really around cloud.
Here again, we are, you know, we haven't really started. I mean, we've got 25 deals, as Soumen mentioned. These are small deals, but we've just begun. We think this could be a large opportunity, especially in a new geopolitical context, where a lot of workloads, and when I speak to many companies, they tell me that a lot of workloads do need a sovereign, requirement. We are fully sovereign. We are controlled by an Indian entity, so the control plane, the data plane, the jurisdiction, all of it is in India.
Our capabilities that we have built for ourselves, which by the way, runs one of the largest cloud instances in India, has given us the confidence to extend into the space. All of these will require capital. Once we've concluded that, then we will look at any other areas. As of now, there's nothing to talk about in terms of additional capital being needed in any other area.
Thank you, Gopal. Thanks for the comprehensive answer. Just to clarify on that one, given whatever you listed is all India assets and given the large transaction in Africa you've announced, it's safe to assume that for the foreseeable future, there are no plans for further capital deployment in non-India assets. Would that be fair to say?
For now, yes, absolutely. I think, we will continue to look at, you know, bolt-on acquisitions in the spaces that we've already talked about, whether it's in towers, it's in cloud, it's in cybersecurity, in B2B specifically. Those are areas that we will continue to look at. If there's anything that's going outside, then at this point in time, there's nothing to talk about.
Very clear. My second question just on ARPUs, when I look at, let’s say, the ARPU, while yes, the growth’s been weak, but even despite limited ARPU growth, you’re now generating like decent returns on capital in the India business at about mid-teens. Free cash flow is improving every year. Your CapEx requirements are not material, at least in the core wireless business. In the context of that, one, is it even realistic to assume any meaningful tariff hikes in the foreseeable future? Like, what would be the rationale for more tariff hikes when the business is doing generally okay from a free cash flow and returns perspective?
Yeah.
A related question, Shashwat mentioned that, you know, from here on you're not happy with how the ARPU was in the previous quarter and you look to accelerate. What will really change the trajectory? I mean, your postpaid adds have been strong, data adds have been strong. Given the base is so large, without tariff hike, shouldn't the growth only continue to decelerate? If you can just maybe provide more color there. Thank you.
You know, Manish, I mean, let me take this and, you know, Shashwat can supplement this, if, you know, Shashwat, you've got anything to add. Fundamentally, my belief is that, you know, the price architecture in this country is broken. You contrast Indian pricing with African pricing. You know, for every GB that is consumed, there is a little bit of revenue that you get. Here fundamentally at about INR 340, INR 350 , you're capped out because you're running unlimited data plans. Nowhere in the world do you see this capping out at unlimited data at these levels. I mean, if you look at markets in the U.S., for example, these kind of plans begin at $60, $70.
You look at even U.S., Europe, most of these markets, you know, unlimited data would really begin at about EUR 35 or GBP 30-GBP 35. The fact is that it's the architecture of pricing that fundamentally is broken and needs to be repaired. You're absolutely right. At the lower entry levels, you know, the price is today at INR 199 in India. You know, at a time like this, to take up prices on those kind of packs is something that we will need to do with caution. If the allowances were to change and the architecture were to change, which is really moving from small, medium, large and extra-large, where you have different sort of amounts of allowance going in, which allows a natural pathway to upgradation.
Given the stratification in this country from the very poor all the way to the very rich, the fact is that ARPU will only go up. It's an unfortunate situation, like I've mentioned before, where the rich are paying less than they ought to and the poor are perhaps paying as much as they need to. This is, I think, the thing that needs to change. Shashwat, is there anything to add?
No, Gopal, I think this is, this is all. Thank you.
Great. Thank you for taking my questions. All the best.
The next question comes from Mr. Kunal Vora. Mr. Vora, you may please unmute your side, introduce yourself, and ask your question now. Mr. Vora, you may please unmute your side, introduce yourself, and ask your question now. The next question comes from Mr. Ankur Rudra. Mr. Rudra, you may please unmute your side, introduce yourself, and ask your question now.
Hi. Thank you. You know, you mentioned ARPU is coming a bit lighter than you were expecting, but it's still sort of up 5% thanks to all the organic drivers you've been working on. I'm just curious, if you think about FY 2027, some of the headwinds on international roaming probably are still here. Do you think there'll be an additional headwind from smartphone shipment drops this year, which might lead to a lower organic ARPU expansion short of any kind of tariff increases?
Shashwat, do you wanna take that?
Yeah, I'll take that, Gopal. Ankur, I think the only thing I would add, Ankur, is We have seen some bit of softening of shipments of handsets, et cetera, and prices going up, so we haven't yet seen any impact, but we can't rule it out. Having said that, the organic ARPU levers that we have, which we want to sweat much more, and especially led by a much bigger play in postpaid as well as getting customers to their best fit plans, upgrading as much as possible within the tiers itself, driven by consumption. I think those levers still give us a good headroom for continuing ARPU growth for many quarters to come. I think it's a combination of both. As Gopal said, the pricing architecture eventually is the biggest unlock, if you ask me. The feature phone to smartphone space needs to be watched because handset prices have gone up very sharply in the last few weeks, which we'll watch.
Thank you. Second question is on, you know, CapEx. You did highlight several demands on capital across new initiatives, financial services, and perhaps even 5G densification if sort of that's part of the plan. Could you maybe talk about CapEx plans for the coming year, how this will change versus prior years, particularly given the intensification on the growth bets versus the core? Maybe just to follow up, how overall capital allocation should look like this year. Thank you.
Look, I think, you know, let me qualify the capital allocation and just sort of I reassure it and underscore the point that I was making. The first and primary port of call for any capital allocation will be our core business. I think we have no right to play in any adjacencies unless our core is vibrant. Within the core, radio CapEx, as I've mentioned before, is moderating. In Africa it's growing, but in India it's moderating. The core CapEx, which is a smaller component of CapEx, is moderated. Transport CapEx, we are gonna double down and actually do more. We've been doing this systematically for the last four years. Our fiber POPs, our fiber points of presence need to increase. A lot more quality of infrastructure needs to be put in place.
There is a big project that is underway, which we spoke about last time, on resilience, just the resilience of our edge data centers. You know, we are focused right now on building in the next 18-24 months 56 world-class edge data centers, which will really stand us in very good stead over the next two to three decades and build a strong point of differentiation for us for computation that could happen at the edge over time. That will continue to be a focus. Data centers we've spoken about, which will be a focus. Home business is another big area of focus. That will continue to get all of the focus.
The cloud business is a modular business in terms of the servers and the compute, but it goes into our existing data centers. We are carving out space in all the data centers that we have. We currently have three cloud regions, and we will continue to bolster capacity in those regions as and when we need to. Financial services will require some investment. We've announced our investment plan already. We will see how this plays out.
We'll do this carefully and prudently, you know, we will step up our growth, but we'll continue to do that in a way that leverages our or sort of builds a culture of both collection efficiency as well as compliance. The net result of all of that, if you look at the CapEx, while we don't give a guidance typically, our sense is that, you know, we will be in the ballpark of this year, give or take a little bit.
The next question comes from Mr. Aditya Suresh. Mr. Suresh, you may please unmute your side, introduce yourself, and ask your question now.
Yeah, thank you for the opportunity. The first question is on return on capital employed. You had kind of mentioned that there's been an expansion there. Today on a consolidated base, you're at about 19%. Is it possible to articulate any targets on a, say, two, three year basis in light of these capital allocation bets which the company is taking? That's question one. Question two was on Nxtra. Could you articulate the business model which you all are thinking about for Nxtra? Is it gonna be tenancy or is it gonna be involving GPUs and renting out said GPUs? In that context, again, could you maybe elaborate and touch on a little bit on your partnership with Google here? Thank you.
On return on capital, I will dodge the bullet of what our targets are. I don't think we give those targets out. I think the fact is that on our core business, given the scale that we have and given the massive amount of heavy lifting that we've seen over the years and the obsession to strip out waste. We hope to continue to see operating leverage as we get growth. That should give us additional sort of returns. On the Nxtra side, you know, for us the model is really around tenancy. This is a co-location model, with specifically with Google. They are building a very large AI data center in Visakhapatnam and we are sort of building it for them. There's again a co-location led project.
We are currently not, you know, doing GPU as a service. As I had mentioned earlier, we are watching the space because, you know, the GPUs that we bought for ourselves in the recent past, a few hundred GPUs, the efficiency of those GPUs is 10x of what the GPUs were two and a half years ago, and they're also cheaper. You know, it's unbelievable actually the pace at which these chips are getting more and more efficient. We are using it for our own needs, for all the AI work that Shashwat spoke about. You know, our data centers are being built with the latest technologies in terms of cooling capabilities, power efficiency, and also a standard toolkit on the build-out, which is really world-class. That's an area that we're working on so that, you know, it's fungible across different customers as we go and build these data centers out.
Thanks, Gopal.
The next question comes from Mr. Sumangal Nevatia. Mr. Nevatia, you may please unmute your side, introduce yourself and ask your question now.
Yeah, good afternoon. Thanks for the chance. My first question is on the wireless, one on the ARPU, since we've seen very impressive 5% organic growth YoY. In our opening remarks, our focus on accelerating ARPU, how should we look at this in absence of a tariff hike? Should we further expect some acceleration here? Then on the wireless CapEx, we've hit a decade low at around 16% of sales. Are we close to the bottom, or should we expect further moderation before 6G CapEx kicks in in the near coming years?
Shashwat, can you take the first one, and Soumen, maybe you can take the second.
Yeah. On the ARPU, I think, we touched upon this briefly, which was the fact that, we see substantial headrooms. There are two parts to it. One is really correcting the pricing architecture going forward, which as and when it happens, will happen. Within the current construct, levers of postpaid penetration within our base, which we feel needs a much larger unlock. International roaming, we'll see how that plays out this year. Even upgrades within the consumption baskets of our customers and the data that they are consuming, we continue to see, be very optimistic, and this will be our largest growth lever as well. I think that's what I would just reiterate.
Coming to the CapEx on wireless, I think 16% is a derived number. As Gopal said, the core would be funded completely. We will ensure it is funded. It has moderated significantly. Yes, it is one of the lowest as percentage sales. In absolute terms, it is very low. If tomorrow we need to do higher 5G densification, we will not shy away. We are not chasing a target, but we will be optimal and prudent in deploying whatever is required, because that is the biggest of the core businesses.
Got it. One just last small question. On the homes ARPU, while we've seen impressive adds over the last few years, ARPU has been decelerating. Should we expect this trend to kind of continue given we are in the land grab phase in the coming years?
Shashwat?
I'll just take that. I think on homes, if you see the new additions in the industry have happened from a slightly lower ARPU compared to the traditional ARPUs that we had. This is plateauing out. I think some of our quarter-on-quarter ARPUs are kind of bottoming out, which trend we are beginning to see in the last two quarters.
I think we just to qualify that, there are two ways to look at ARPU. One is, you know, the customers that you acquire, the, you know, new customers and these existing customers. The existing customers, you know, simply because of penetration as it's grown, you had people on higher plans in the past, and so the just the mix kind of drives that ARPU down. But that, as Shashwat said, the acquisition ARPU is not declining at all over the many quarters.
Yeah
you know, at some point it'll I think the real challenge here in homes is to step up our penetration and really grab as much share of homes, because long-term that will be a very significant moat for the company. This is a very high, you know, this is a business that is very profitable over a period of time because the churn and the customer lifetime value of a home tends to be very low. This is, by the way, this is all across the world. The moment you drive convergence, which means you content plus mobility, the lifetime value increases even more. Our metric really is to expand the base right now. That's the focus.
Thanks, and all the best.
We are very pleased to have Mr. Mittal join us on the call today. I request all the interested participants to kindly use the raise hand option to ask questions addressed to him. With this, the next question comes from Mr. Sanjesh Jain. Mr. Jain, you may please unmute your side, introduce yourself and ask your question now.
Yeah, thank you. Thanks for the opportunity. I think I'll take this opportunity to address Mr. Mittal. Sir, just wanted to understand now that we have executed the Africa stake sale, and in the process, the promoter stake in the company has gone up. We also have a stated objective of having an equal stake along with the partner Singtel. Now, how should we see whether you still continue to have the view that it will be only Bharti Telecom which will own Bharti Airtel, or you see an opportunity to have an equal stake with Pastel and ICIL also owning along with Bharti Telecom?
Sanjesh, you know, basically the belief remains that you must have everything through one company that should be the controlling promoting shareholder. Bharti Telecom, as you know historically, has just not only been the founding promoter of this company, has had almost always for a long period of time, a controlling shareholding of 51%. If you really ask me, my own wish is that in the next I know it's hard to put in, you know, years on it, and next decade, as I kind of come to a point where I hand over the reins to the next generation as shareholders, Bharti Telecom should get back to controlling shareholding 51%, or just over 50%.
There's 10% more to go, and for a company of this magnitude and size, you can imagine that it's not a small task. The principle, you know, direction or vision that I carry in my mind is all shares that we can from both ICIL or Bharti family entities and Singtel should go into Bharti Telecom as much as possible. To put a bit more granular sort of angle to it, Singtel had a difference of about 7%, or rather has 7% direct stake in Airtel, and it had about 6% to equalize. Now with this transaction, once this is done and share the issue, this gap comes down to 3.6%. First and foremost, we should see overall this gap dramatically reduces.
If Singtel, which has been on the path of a sell down of this direct stake, has to sell now much less than earlier. 3.6% over the next three years or so, let's say three, four years, less than 1% a year, gets Singtel onto the equalization path that they stated in the last two years. That brings us to equal stake. Then it'll be during this period of our effort, depending on how well, you know, Gopal, Shashwat, Soumen and the entire management team delivers these wonderful cash flows, more dividends, more buybacks. Idea would be to keep using that, you know, twin lever to get BTL above the 50% stake. That'll be my cherished desire. Our stake must go back to BTL.
For that, I need a little bit more lever in the hands of BTL, which I'm hoping will be delivered through continuously enhanced dividend as you are seeing. I think hopefully, in the next couple of years, some buybacks in addition to the dividend. That will give us the necessary capacity in BTL to buy more. If I could do it today, honestly, I will do my transfer to BTL now, but BTL needs that little bit more headroom on cash.
That's, that's very clear, sir. Very helpful. Thanks for that answer. Two question on Shashwat, Gopal, and team. First on the enterprise business, you said the order book has grown 17%, which is quite heartening to hear. How should we see growth rate now that the commodity business which we discontinued is behind and growth rate for FY 2027 should be significantly better than FY 2026? Will this also mean that the new business will come with a better ROC in the enterprise part of the business? That's number one.
Then second, on the adjacencies, we have been seeing there's a widening gap of market share between us and Jio. We are more using fiber as a lever to grow. FWA appears to be having a lower lead time, and they are able to grab that the customer base much faster. How should we see our strategy of heavily focused on fiber versus FWA for the peer? That's my first question.
Yes, Sanjesh, thank you. You know, on B2B, the B2B business actually comprises of a whole portfolio of businesses. On the one hand, you've got a, you know, commoditized business, which is really messaging, where the margins tend to be low, but there's also no CapEx. It's just riding on the existing pipes. This business is sort of flattish to declining slightly depending on how you skin it, fundamentally because of price pressures as well as the move to OTT platforms. This is one part of the business. The second part of the business is really connectivity, which is growing. The industry grows at about low single digits. We've been growing faster because we've been gaining share over the last few years, and we continue to focus on connectivity.
We have a leading position here in connectivity, particularly in distributed businesses, manufacturing distribution, banking financial services, et cetera, et cetera. We need to do perhaps a slightly better job in the IT services space, but we have leading positions here on connectivity. Then you come to the third part of the portfolio, which is data centers, which we've already spoken about, and the fourth part of the portfolio is our digital businesses. The digital businesses are essentially CPaaS. These are sort of value added over the messaging, basic messaging where, you know, you do, you know the kind of things we've done on spam.
The first project that we started with HDFC, working with a direct pipe that really cuts spam altogether. No CapEx here, right? The margins tend to be lower because when you start looking at EBITDA, it's not necessarily a relevant indicator because there's no CapEx on that business. That's one type of business. The second is security.
Security comprises of, basically our secure, security operation center. That's a service business. Again, very little CapEx. It's people who run it and tools that run it. Then partnerships with security companies which sell products. Again, no CapEx. Then there's cloud, which has high CapEx. When you look at all of this, if you ask me, if we have to step up growth, there will be some margin pressures because there's just a mix of the business. Connectivity will always continue to have very high margins, CPaaS will have lower margins, and digital businesses will have lower margins. Our effort has to be to grow the top line faster and grow the absolute EBITDA faster, right? Absolute profit faster. I think that should be the focus of this business, and that's really what we are, embarked on.
On the, you know, the home broadband piece, you know, Shashwat will add to this. But I feel, you know, for us to comment on a competitor and, you know, how they're performing is not the a relevant thing to do today. The way that we look at it, Sanjesh, is we have various ways to look at our competitive performance. We use, you know, OTT platforms like Meta, which have very rich data that is provided on the number of sessions or the number of connections that are run on different mediums, whether it's wireless, it's fixed, or it's fixed wireless access. When I look at that, over the last, you know, few quarters, and I must say that this was not true two quarters ago. Over the last couple of quarters, our performance has been very delightful.
Yeah.
That's
Only thing to add, Sanjesh, only thing to add on that is also what we are seeing is, for us, if we can get a customer on fiber, that's the best type of customer. For us, the wireless strategy is augmenting reach a little bit. Wherever we can't get, we put in there. We will stay fiber first, Sanjesh, and I think we can. As Gopal said on the way we measure it is slightly differently. We'll stay focused on just building as much business as possible through fiber.
Sanjesh, there's one other thing that is happening, which is the, you know, I think Shashwat alluded to this, the rising prices of chipsets and memory, particularly on fixed wireless access. You could recall like a year ago when we doubled down on fixed wireless access, the cost to connect the home was more or less the same as fiber. That has fundamentally changed in the last three to four months.
The fixed wireless access has now become very much more expensive. We've pivoted the whole company back to a dramatic obsession on fiber. In fact, a lot of digital tools have been rolled out to minimize the leakage that we are seeing of installing a fixed wireless connection where a fiber is available. That has almost come to zero now because of the digital tools that have been launched. That has actually been triggered in the month of April, and that will play out over the course of the next couple of months before we sort of really ramp this up in a very big way.
That's very clear. Thanks, Gopal. Just one bookkeeping question, probably. I see the EPS translation from the EBITDA has been a little weaker in my view. The interest and finance cost has been quite sticky, at INR 4,000 crore, while our net debt keep coming down. Even I was just looking at India business, our interest and finance cost continues to remain a little sticky while the deleveraging effort continue. Soumen , can you help us understand what's stopping the finance cost to fall in the same pattern as our net debt?
Yeah, Sanjesh.
When should we see that transition?
I'll answer that quickly. There are two parts, the Console and India. In Console, there has been a bit of one-off in Africa which will unwind. In India, a large part of debt reduction actually happened towards the end of the quarter. The money of the rights also came in around mid of March. The payment of this AGR dues happened on the last day. There is reduction, and you will see reduction going forth. Thanks, Sanjesh.
Thank you, sir. Thanks for all those answers, and best of luck for the coming quarters.
The next question comes from Mr. Vivekanand Subbaraman. Mr. Subbaraman, you may please unmute your side, introduce yourself, and ask your question now.
Yeah. I hope I'm audible. Thank you so much for the opportunity. Mr. Mittal, you shared certain aspirations like your desire to see BTL stake in Airtel rise to 51%. In the past, you also mentioned about a subscriber target of around 800 million. Now, with this new bet in lending, what are the other growth areas that you may be looking at, perhaps, which could be growth engines for the group, let's say, in the next decade? That's my first question. I'll ask the other ones for someone later. Thank you.
I mean, you know, Airtel and India, the combination offers a once in a lifetime opportunity to any corporation anywhere in the world. You know, with 1.5 billion people, young, hungry for more services and products, a growing country, it's an opportunity which is very rare. I mean, there are opportunities that have been available to companies in China of this scale. I mean, I can't really think of many others other than OTT players like Meta and Google and all who have had global presence. China, as you know, has been having restriction that have been confined locally home. Going into Africa 15 years back was a very, very, you know, forward-looking visionary move that we made, and today that is paying dividends.
As Gopal earlier alluded, Africa is where probably India was 10, 20 years back. You got another 1,000,000,000+ young people, you know, growing at rapid clip. What India saw in the last 10 years, and Africa will see in the next 10 years. It's really a very strong, you know, to play market for us in a very, very densely populated young population. As more AI, as more technology, you know, takes roots, we become more and more relevant by the day.
In most African countries there are only two operators. Somewhere there are three, but mostly two. India has really got three private operators, amongst which two are having a very large dominant market share. It's a once in a lifetime opportunity. We should add whatever we can add that makes sense. You know, we have been very disciplined. We have not gone into areas that do not, you know, meet with the core of our business. We never had this good problem to solve for more cash coming than what we need for our core business. Allocate everything to core, allocate more and what is required for growing areas like data center and cloud. Also look at adjacencies, with a very, very strong disciplined lens.
In these financial services has been much talked about in the analyst community and, you know, investors. Fact is, we are looking for a very small, controlled financial services business at the moment. If it starts to yield great results and you come back and encourage us to do more, we'll do more. What are we saying? We want to give small ticket lending to our own customer base who we understand deeply well, and we have demonstrated over the last year and a half, two years that that lending that we do is significantly superior to the best in class in the industry. Even people like Bajaj Finance and many others come to us to do the LSP program because we identify customers who pay significantly better than the industry benchmark.
There is a clear method behind what we are doing, and the total amount that we are looking at, allocating the next five years, we have stated INR 20,000 crores, of which INR 14,000 crores has to come from Airtel. It looks like it'll be probably significantly less than that. As for the, you know, work that we have been doing, it may be much less than that number. We talk about a very small amount over five years being allocated to financial services. After one, one and a half years, if we don't show you a demonstrative proof of the success that we are getting, then you will be sure that we will not be throwing in money behind a business that is not making sense for us. We have spoken in the past about expanding in the other geographies.
We are very mindful that we have tasks to do. This Airtel Africa exchange of shares that was announced yesterday is akin to, you know, acquiring another company of a large size. A $3 billion transaction means you're making an acquisition, and you're making an acquisition of a business that you know deeply well, a business in which all of us are working day and night adding value. We need to own more of it. Thankfully, the U.K. regulations allow you to go up to 90%. With this move, in one fell swoop, we have gone up to now 78%. Ambition for Airtel should be whatever is allowed to go up to 90%, one day should get there. That is being ably helped by Airtel Africa's own buyback program.
They have been doing buybacks from time to time. Hopefully, in the next few years with their buyback program and if some other block comes from any other investor to Airtel's attention, we will probably, in the next several years, get to that point of owning more of Africa so that we can get more income flowing back to the mothership, Bharti Airtel and reward our shareholders even more. After giving allocation to all this, if we are still left with more money, as I mentioned, we'll do more dividends, we'll do buyback programs. We'll never become like IT companies who have done nothing but just taken money out as dividends and buybacks, dividends and buybacks, and they become a shadow of themselves.
Many of those companies should have been buying leading-edge businesses in their own industry in the last 10, 15 years. They would have been in a different position today. You will probably come back and encourage us, go buy some more good value telecom assets around the globe. As Gopal said, nothing on the table today. It's probably a medium to longer term horizon. We'll come back to you. We'll get to 800 million customers by way of mobile, home broadband, our digital services, our financial services. Between India and Africa, getting to 500 million here and 300 million in Africa is a dream which is visible. I mean, you can look at that. It's not too far.
Thank you. That was very helpful. Shashwat and Gopal, extending on your question on the pricing architecture, what will it really take for the industry to move to usage-based pricing? Because we've also seen that since the time the leading two telcos rolled out 5G, there is still an unlimited offer going on, and the two of you perhaps have not yet decided to move even 5G to metered data. Is there a path that you have in mind to moving to metered data, or is it just an aspiration still? Thank you.
Vivekanand Subbaraman, I'm mindful of time, so we probably this will be the last question before I hand it to Vaidehi . You know, as of now, there is, you know, It's a competitive market. We will not do anything that will hurt our business. I have just mentioned that, you know, this architecture doesn't make sense. Let's see how this plays out over time. Vaidehi, back to you.
Thank you very much, Gopal. Thank you, everyone, and thank you for joining us, Mr. Mittal. We will now begin with the Bharti Hexacom earnings call. I would like to hand over the call to Mr. Soumen Ray for his opening remarks on Bharti Hexacom performance. Over to you, Mr. Soumen.
Thank you, Vaidehi. Good afternoon, everyone. Welcome to the Bharti Hexacom Q4 FY 2026 earnings call. I have with me Karthik and Naval on the call. I'll start with our FY 2026 performance. We delivered strong results with continued operating leverage, led by razor-sharp execution and operational excellence. Revenues and EBITDA growth came in at about 9.4% and 17.9% respectively. Margins expanded by 3.4%- 47.6%. Strong operating leverage is attributable to the continued efforts on portfolio premiumization and our war on waste agenda. The company further strengthened its position in both markets with sustained revenue and market share improvement. The homes and office business saw stellar performance with 51% revenue growth and the highest ever net adds of 395,000. Our IPTV services launch is seeing strong traction and strengthening our convergence strategy.
During the year, our CapEx spends were directed towards 5G densification, network modernization, and growing our homes and IPTV business rapidly. Despite that, our operating free cash generation, which is EBITDA minus CapEx, came in at about INR 2,935 crores. A solid 27% increase over last year. Balance sheet is robust, with a net debt excluding leases at about INR 2,000 crores. The board recommended a dividend of INR 18 per share as compared to INR 10 per share last year, in line with our philosophy of progressive payout. Moving to a quick update on our Q4 performance. We delivered another quarter of strong performance with revenue of INR 2,414 crore, growing 2.3% sequentially. EBITDA for the quarter came in at over INR 1,155 crores with a margin of 47.9%.
We ended the quarter with mobile customer base of 28.8 million. Net customer addition for the quarter came in at about 370,000. Smartphone customer addition was strong at almost INR 5 lakh, about 478,000, highest in the last four quarters. ARPU for the quarter was INR 252, impacted by two days less, whilst on an EBITDA basis it would be closer to about INR 257-INR 258. Our homes business continues to see strong momentum with record high net adds of 148,000, driving a revenue growth of about 21% sequentially.
This momentum is underscored by our FWA expansion to lower pin codes, continued deepening of FTTH footprint, and the rollout of IPTV. CapEx for the quarter was INR 586 crores. Acceleration was as planned. Operating free cash generation, which is EBITDA minus CapEx, came in at about INR 570 crores. With that, I will hand over to Vaidehi to open the floor for questions.
Thank you very much, Soumen. We will now begin the Q&A interactive session. Due to time constraints, we would request if you could limit the number of questions to two per participants to enable more participation. Interested participants may click on Raise Hand option on the Zoom application to join the Q&A queue. With this, the first question comes from Mr. Sanjesh Jain. Mr. Jain, you may please unmute your side, introduce yourself and ask your question now.
Yeah, thanks. Thanks, Soumen, for taking the question I got too. First, on the comparison of mobile growth of Hexacom versus Airtel. In this year, on both the levers, Hexacom has performed lower than Airtel. On revenue we were 8.3%, Airtel was close to 12% on an EBITDA. We were 15%, Airtel was 17% on it. I thought we had a lever to grow faster than Airtel, under penetration and all those lever we had.
What changed in this quarter, how should we see it for the next coming year? Should this accelerate? What are the corrective measures we have taken? That's number one. Number two, on the utilization of cash flow. All the peripherals, what we are doing is at Airtel level. Hexacom largely restrict itself to mobile and FTTH, where it is fully funded. Should we see a much sharper payout ratio in Hexacom in the coming years? These are my initials. Thank you.
Thanks, Sanjesh. Sanjesh, I think our impression that Hexacom is under-penetrated, the two circles that it operates, has borne out well. I mean, of course, we can cut the data the way we want, but we have done reasonably well. The ARPU gap is much closer. We have been able to close the ARPU gap. As I had told earlier also, the post-paid penetration bit and the IR bit will be a little differential. As you know, and was, I think, mentioned earlier in the call, the smartphone upgrade will see a bit of stress and hence we might lag a little bit because that's a very strong indicator. We will be launching some multiple ways of driving convergence, and we will see how best we can accelerate the growth of Bharti Hexacom.
I would say it is competitive, it is not lagging the market, and we continue to look at opportunities as to how to grow faster. ARPU has certainly come out well. We will continue to look at customers as well. On the next question around utilization of cash flow, yes, some of the growth engines that the parent has is not available to Hexacom. Now, it has two challenges, Sanjesh. One challenge is, of course, the requirement of investment is not there. On the flip side, the growths and the new growths will be to that extent restricted.
We have increased the dividend payout significantly, and we have been committed that we will be looking at a progressively increasing dividend payout, and we continue to remain on that. I think we have moved from INR 3-INR 4 to INR 10-INR 18, so I think we have been sticking to our word around progressively increasing the dividend payout.
Thanks. Thanks, Soumen. That's very clear. Just one, if I may squeeze. On the FWA considering the all the issues around chips, which Gopal spoke, do you see home growth can slightly decelerate until this entire chip situation get resolved for Hexacom? That was one big lever for us.
Yeah, yeah. You know, how do you look at FWA? The way we look at FWA is what is the cost of a connected home, what is the cost of connecting a home.
Yeah.
Now, in difficult terrains with fiber, cost of connecting 1 home is much higher than, let's say, in a plain, let's say, if you are in Maharashtra, it is much easier to lay fiber, or in Tamil Nadu or in such places. If you go to Mesa, you know, actually FWA creates an opportunity to go around and connect more homes, which it will be difficult with fiber. I do not think that whilst prices will go up and we will pivot to fiber wherever we can, we are going to give up on the opportunity of acquiring more homes and offices through either FWA or fiber in Bharti Hexacom. No, we will not let up on that opportunity.
That's quite clear, Soumen Ray. Thanks very much for answering all those questions, and best of luck for the coming quarters.
Thank you, Sanjesh.
The next question comes from Mr. Pranav Kshatriya. Mr. Kshatriya, you may please unmute your side, introduce yourself, and ask your question now.
Hi. Thanks for the opportunity. My first question regarding the count of the ARPU. If I look at this quarter's results, you know, we had a fairly good growth in the post subscriber base as well as post-pay addition. However, ARPU growth has not happened. You partly explained in the opening remarks that, you know, there was some impact of international roaming. Is that the only factor which impacted the ARPU in this quarter, or there is something else which is playing out?
Well, yes, there is something else which is played out, which is the whole, you know, eat as much as you can on 5G packs. That is, the more adoption happens, that will clearly create a headwind. Having said that, you know, the ARPU that we give is the average for the quarter. I mean, the exit for the quarter, the quarter plays out there are three months. Pranav, there is no red flags per se on ARPU in terms of is there a cause of concern. The headwinds that we have are similar to any other player in any other geography, which is lower international roaming, handset prices slightly going up, and hence having a pressure on 2G to 4G upgrades.
The fact that we now have a pack, which destroys the whole price ladder which any company should have, you know. If you are selling something, the more you consume, the more you pay. Not necessarily in the same ratio, but certainly in absolute terms. With that getting broken, those are the headwinds which are there for this organization as well as for any player in this country.
Okay. Thank you. My second question is, there has been a good action in the homes, subscriber addition. Should we expect, you know, the pace of addition to continue, or, you know, there could be some headwind?
Pranav, first of all, I cannot give you forward-looking statements. We don't give guidance. See, the objective is to continue to grow. As of now, there is no reason for me in a earnings call to flag off that there is a concern, but it's a competitive market, so the competition part always exists. There is no fundamental reason why we are letting up on our effort to grow homes as much or even more. The effort will continue. Three, two months from now we will meet again. Three months from now we'll meet again, and we'll see.
As I said, whilst the chipset prices have gone up, we are not relenting on our effort on acquisition. We are pivoting. If the fiber is available, we would like to go fiber first, also trying to see how much we can lay fiber. As mentioned to the previous question in, per participant, Sanjesh, It's a difficult terrain. To that extent, the pivoting in these two geographies would be a little less than some other geographies where it is much easier.
Okay. Thank you so much. That's it from my side. Wish you all the very best.
Thank you, Pranav.
The next question comes from Mr. Vivekanand Subbaraman. Mr. Subbaraman, you may please unmute your side, introduce yourself and ask your question now.
Thank you very much for the opportunity. I'm Vivekanand from Ambit. Just one question. What does the regulatory charge this quarter pertain to? Is there any new demand from the government, which has affected you this quarter? If you could clarify on this, it'd be great. Thank you.
Well, you know, as any prudent organization, we look at all the basket of charges and whatever is happening in the ecosystem, and we follow a very prudent accounting policy. That, we do it from time to time. There's a regular cadence that we do, as guided by along with the auditors and by the board and audit committee. We have felt that there is something that we should, in a prudence, take a provision for, which has been disclosed. There is nothing new, exceptional or unearthly which has come. It is just interpretation of issues as time progresses and various things happens in the ecosystem, but nothing new.
Okay. Soumen Ray, just to understand better, this charge was earlier perhaps part of contingent liabilities and has now been provided for. Is that how one should think about it since you are saying that there is no new demand?
Well, I'll not get into specific details, but it is not a new thing. It was an existing thing. The interpretation of that existing thing has been changed, and accordingly it has been provided for.
All right. Thank you, and all the best.
Thank you.
Thank you, everyone. Now I would like to pass it back to Mr. Soumen Ray for his closing remarks.
Thanks a lot, everyone, for joining the call for Q4 FY 2026. Look forward to catching up with all of you in the next quarter. Thank you.
Thank you everyone for joining us today. The recording of this webinar will be available on our company website. Have a great day ahead. Bye.