Q3 20/21

Feb 3, 2021

Quarterly report

We're joining us on this webinar to discuss Part D Airtel's Q3 FY 2021 results. Before I hand over to Gopal for his opening remarks, I wanted to quickly remind all the participants that we will be conducting a question and answer session after the opening remarks. Participants who wish to ask a question can send can type in the question and send it to us using the moderator chat option on the BlueJeans interface. We will take those in a first come, first serve basis. With this, Gopal, I hand over to you for your opening remarks, please. Thank you, Komal. Good afternoon, everybody. Thank you for joining us today for this webinar to discuss our results for the Q3 31st December 2020, which we announced yesterday. Present with me on this webinar today are Badal, Harjeet and Komal. Let me start by saying, Like the unprecedented volatility that we have confronted through this year, we delivered another strong performance. More important, this consistency in performance It is across every part of our portfolio. As a result, we have grown revenue market share in each of our businesses. I would say that the core drivers of this performance are our agility, the continued reorientation of our business model and our relentless focus on what truly matters, serving our customers. Let me now turn to our results. Our consolidated revenues grew sequentially by 5.8%, while the India business grew by 5.5% in the quarter. With the benefit of operating leverage, our EBITDA margins grew sequentially from 44.9% to 45.9%. I want to now provide a little more texture to every part of our portfolio. First, Airtel Business. As I mentioned before, I'm particularly excited about this business as we pivot our company to becoming a significant player in the B2B space. While we have shown double digit growth over the last few years, we've also consistently grown market share and are outperforming other listed players in the last few quarters. Our business model is also extremely efficient as reflected in our industry leading margins of 38.7%. There are 3 parts to our portfolio of products that we offer in B2B. At the core is connectivity, which we believe will continue to grow, Led by increased requirements of capacity in large businesses as well as the growing need for connectivity in small businesses. The opportunity for us to grow market share is still immense since a disproportionate amount of our business comes from the top 20% of our customers, Both in the large as well as small business segments. We are therefore revamping our entire go to market to provide equal emphasis both to hunting and farming. The second part of our portfolio is in adjacencies. We are making substantial investments. There are 2 that I want to just briefly talk about at the moment, data centers and Airtel IQ. Our data center business continues to grow With 120 hyper edge data centers, putting us in a leadership position in the space. You also signed an MOU with MIDC We're setting up 2 new data center campuses, 1 each in Mumbai and Pune. Equally, we are excited at the prospect of serving hyperscalers. For NetelIQ, we've now acquired over 45 customers, large customers. We have a large and dedicated team working to build our state Build out state of the art features that go beyond voice to offer a full suite of cloud communications In this $1,000,000,000 market, the 3rd part of our portfolio is a partnership led model. We have partnerships With players like Cisco to drive connectivity solutions bundled with routing. This is seeing strong traction. Airtel Secure and Airtel Cloud are Two services that we launched last quarter. We are seeing substantial growth of our order book in both these areas. We will double down on this by ramping up hiring capabilities. Hiring and capabilities, I meant. Our ambition to stitch this entire portfolio spanning the core, Adjacencies and partnerships through a digital wrap is now well underway. One of the interesting initiatives we launched during the quarter was our customer advisory board, which gives our customers a preeminent voice in our strategy. The next business I want to talk about is our Homes business. The broadband category is clearly seeing very strong adoption. And I believe the next few years will be the time for scaling this business as the need for high speed broadband explodes. We continue to focus on our core strategy of expansion and experience in this business. We added 1,400,000 fiber home passes during the quarter, a scale of rollout that is now at a historic high. In fact, we're also in the process of rapidly upgrading our legacy copper assets completely to fiber. I believe that in a year or so, we will shut down our copper infrastructure and have only fiber to the home. This is a game changing move that will dramatically raise our experience and lower our cost. Through our LCO model, which is our local Cable operator model, we are currently in 120 plus cities and growing rapidly. I had mentioned a few quarter ago that we are on course to get to 1,000 cities in a year or so, and we believe we are very much on course. We further embellish the power of our proposition, Encompassing connectivity, entertainment and a unified experience with Airtel Extreme, we're now making steady progress on our bundling of convergence As a result, we've added 215,000 customers in the quarter, a level of growth that has been the highest since we started this business. While our revenues and margins contracted, this was primarily due to the flow through impact of pricing decisions taken in the last quarter. And this flow through impact was largely on the base where we had adjusted our pricing, not on the acquisition ARPU that we are getting, which is healthy. We added about 485,000 customers in our DTH segment And registered a sequential revenue growth of just under 5%. In fact, one of the highlights of this business It's competitive and consistent performance. We believe we have outstripped all other players in terms of revenue growth. We also believe that on a like to like basis, we are now clearly the number 2 player in the DTH industry. Let me now turn to our mobile business that has had another consistent quarter of performance. Revenues grew by INR 947 Grew sequentially, a growth of 6.8%. This also enabled us to expand our margins. In fact, our Incremental EBITDA margin was about 60%. This growth in wireless was driven by an overall customer net adds of 14,200,000 and an ARPU increase from INR162 to INR166. 4 gs net adds stood at INR13,000,000 Our strong performance on postpaid was sustained. We added 700,000 customers in the quarter. As a result, Our data usage per month was at 16.4 gigabytes and voice at 10 27 minutes per month. We believe we've gained market share once again. And my guess is that we would be at a lifetime high of close to 35% revenue market share. Delivering a superior experience and raising the aspiration of our brand is the cornerstone of our strategy. We are therefore obsessed with smart investments and experience. During the quarter, we added another 7,414 sites. We continue to densify our networks through additional sectors, twin beams and refarming of spectrum. In addition, we've raised the bar in the leverage of digital tools to monitor and improve network experience. We've also conclusively demonstrated last week that our networks are now 5 gs ready through our test of a 5 gs network Using the existing spectrum bands in the city of Hyderabad. This is a seminal announcement that shows how our existing investments across radio, Transport and the core are all future proofed to consistently raise the experience and aspiration bar. Finally, I want to comment on our digital services. As I've said before, our digital flywheel does three things. It allows us to get more efficient And deliver a better omnichannel experience on the core business. This increases lifetime value and eliminates waste. 2nd, it allows us to build new revenue streams on our core foundational strengths of data payments, distribution and network. Finally, it allows us to create an ecosystem of powerful partnerships that leverage these foundational strengths. There are four highlights of the quarter that I would like to briefly touch on. First, we are consistently growing our share of business online, Both payments as well as acquisitions. This helps us lower cost and improve experience. Our capabilities for delivery of a service, Be the SIM or installation of a home broadband are now all stitched together in one seamless omnichannel experience That leverages our underlying Airtel IQ platform. So from search to discovery To purchase, to onboarding, to experience, we are moving towards one simple, unified and intuitive experience. This is now happening on the B2C side through our digital assets as also the B2B side With the rapid adoption of the Airtel Enterprise Hub, which aims to be the one stop shop for sales and service, Our data science capabilities are now growing in strength. 1 of the big use cases we are now driving He's using machine learning and AI based network planning that is beginning to ensure that every site we deploy is in the right place And gives us the right level of profitability in just 90 days. The second part on the digital that I want to talk about is that in this quarter, We also saw the launch of Airtel's SafePay, India's safest mode for making digital payments that leverage the exclusive strength Of the intelligence in our network to provide an additional layer of authentication, coupled with the bank Wala SIM That has integrated our payments bank at the heart of the telco, we believe that we have a strong point of differentiation that solves a real customer problem, Financial convenience and security. The 3rd highlight of the quarter was the sustained growth of our digital assets. We now have about 190,000,000 monthly active users. Wink is now the number one music app With a MAU base of 67,000,000 users, Airtel Extreme is up to 40,000,000 monthly active users. Thanks is becoming more and more ubiquitous. This scale is critical for us to meet our ambition of realizing significant revenues from digital services. The 4th highlight of this quarter was the growth in our partnerships. We continue to build momentum on Airtel Secure and Airtel Cloud. We also launched an exclusive 1st in the world partnership with the Amazon Prime Video Mobile Edition. In conclusion, I want to touch on 2 additional pieces of information. Our Bangladesh joint venture, Robi Axiata, Where we hold 28.18 percent stake, so an IPO and witnessed a stellar listing on the local bourse. This again demonstrates the trust of the investor community in our capabilities. By the way, this investment by itself It's nearly worth $800,000,000 to $900,000,000 today. Besides Airtel Africa, this is another valuable and internationally diversified part of our overall company. We also saw the merger of Indus Towers Limited and Bharti Infratel, Which was completed on 19th November 2020. The combined entity is now called Indus Towers Limited. As a result, the tower entity is no more our subsidiary, and the merged entity is treated as a joint venture in accordance with accounting standards. Accordingly, financials of Bharti and Fratel are not consolidated in our financials and have been represented as share of joint venture associates for all comparable periods in our IR pack. As a result, we have provided corresponding previous period numbers So as to allow you to analyze the underlying growth of the business. In fact, on this note, I do want to underscore Our high standards of corporate governance and transparency in reporting. And let me spell this out in greater detail. First, our reporting of customer revenues. These are the most stringent in the industry and are based on actual revenue earned by a customer in the last 30 days And not based on whether they're still there in our system as a customer. 2nd, we provide transparency by segregating results and KPIs For every line of business, we believe this is important for you to assess our relative performance when compared to peers in the most granular way possible. 3rd, our philosophy of provisions is based on the most conservative view so that you are not surprised. And finally, if you look at Our accounting for depreciation or spectrum amortization, we do it on the basis of globally accepted practices that every top notch telecom companies follows. We would also love to hear your inputs on our transparency standards so that we can continue to raise the bar always. In sum, this quarter has demonstrated yet again our strong execution across the entire portfolio. Our digital capabilities are now formidable. Our experience continues to be the best, and our brand remains the most aspirational brand in the industry. With this, we open up for Q and A. Thank you, Gopal. The first question comes from Vivekananda Subramanian from Ambet Capital, he wants to know that with 4 gs net adds continuing at a breakneck pace and being matched by aggressive power add, will we revisit our spectrum renewal plans? And therefore, how should we look at the upcoming spectrum auction for Aetna? I think since the auction is around the corner, I will not be able to give you too much detail on our Spectrum's auction strategy, but suffice it to say, and I think we mentioned this before in prior quarters, We have a few the first thing that we do would love to have is a full footprint of sub gigahertz spectrum across the country. I think for us, this will be important in order to give our customers deep indoor coverage as well as cover deeper rural areas. And as you know, there are many circles, particularly in the West, in some parts of the North, UP West, Haryana, Then of course in the Western Gujarat, Maharashtra, MP, Kerala, where we do not have sub gigahertz spectrum, so we would love to actually have that. There are some renewals coming up on the 1800 band. There's also some capacity spectrum available on the 2,300 band where we've already got deployed equipment. A combination of capacity or renewal, we will look and balance it and make sure that we kind of optimize what we do. So that's really broadly how we're thinking about it. Thanks, Gopal. The next question is from Kunal Vohra, who wants to and what are our thoughts on tariff hikes, specifically the strong subscriber addition and market share gains? Would we prefer a status quo on tariff hikes? Would we on tariffs, would we like them to be heightened in the near term? Yes. Kunal, thank you. That's a question that comes up every quarter. So let me take that. I think Like we've mentioned before, we would love to see tariffs go up. I think this is obviously something that the industry needs. If ARPUs have to get to INR200 and finally ultimately to INR300, which is something that as an industry We deserve in order to generate a reasonably good return on capital employed. This is what would be required for the business model to succeed. Having said that, as you know, pricing is a competitive issue and it's based on competitive dynamics. So I can't comment When pricing will go up, I do believe that we will be ready to take up tariffs if and when any player actually moves tariffs given that we're already at a premium. Thanks Gopal. The next set of questions are from Ashwin Jain, ICICI, APPRO, AMC and few others who want to understand what is the outlook on the home broadband business and the gap between Airtel and Jio on the home broadband business has narrowed I wrote from more than GBP 2,000,000 to less than GBP 1,000,000 now. So therefore, is there any structural cost advantage or disadvantage that we have? And what is the general outlook or any projections that we can share on this business? I think I've already touched on that in my opening remarks, but let me provide a little more texture to this. I think the home broadband category is at a cusp in terms of growth. And ever since COVID and the growth of work from home as well as A study from home, there has been an explosion in home broadband. The increased penetration of Streaming services has also resulted in an acceleration of home broadband. We were available in about 100 cities. And if you look at these 100 cities, we've added a historic high in terms of home passes that we have deployed in this quarter. In addition to this, we've also rolled out the local cable operator model. I think this is a breakthrough model that we have now got hundreds of local cable operators in over 120 cities And planning to get to about 1,000 cities in a year. So we believe that we will leave no stone unturned to invest in home broadband through a combination of where we can do our own rollouts in the top cities and partner with our cable partners for the last mile in the smaller cities. I just want to add one more point, You know, which is that I think the home broadband business also gives us an opportunity to have a deeper relationship across the entire portfolio of mobility and entertainment, and we have seen that where we are able to bundle services with an integrated suite of products across Entertainment, Mobility and Broadband, we see a dramatic reduction in churn. We see an increase in what we call our Power, which is average revenue per account, which is our average revenue per home. And that is a very, very interesting proposition. So One of the things that we are doing is relooking at our entire go to market and our digital model, Which will bring together the entire suite of products and make it available in an omnichannel perspective to really power this. You will hear more about this in the coming quarters as we unveil our plans. Thank you, Gopal. There are a set of questions on the DTH business as well. What is the outlook on that business specifically given that in the U. S. AT and T has taken a RMB1 billion write off in this business, are we continuing to be excited about this business in India or is this also prone to technological disruption? I think broadly every business is prone to technological disruption. So I don't think we can be complacent about not being prone to it. But having said that, I think the structure of the DTH industry is still such that it is attractive in the medium to long term. And the reason I say it is for perhaps two reasons. Number 1 is that the price structure in India on the linear television side It's very, very low when compared to most of the markets. I mean, even if you look at a market like Philippines, let alone the U. S, for an average consumer, You end up paying for, let's say, 15 of maybe 20 channels, you'll end up paying about $15 per month. In India, you can get for about $4 to $5 pretty much 200 channels per month. So the cost of actually having these Linear entertainment in the home is pretty cheap in India. That's one factor. The second factor is that if you look at The DTH industry, it's a tiny fraction of the total industry that consumes or total set of customers that consumes linear entertainment. There's still a very large and fragmented cable play that operates in India. And if you know, Cable players tend to have poorer experience, poorer quality of response and challenges that customers face. So wherever we find We're able to actually go in deeper. We're able to convert from cable. So the upside opportunity to convert from cable is high. The price structure is such that it's a small amount to pay to get channels that you may still want to consume along with Streaming services. And finally, streaming is still a niche industry in India, Given that the cost structure of streaming is contingent on more broadband penetration as also then the payment for the content. So for all these three reasons, I think the DTH industry or the DTH segment continues to hold promise in the medium term. Thank you, Gopal. Harjeet, the next set of questions are for you. The question is from Vivek from DSP Mutual Fund, who wants to know how do we better debt profile to move over the next few years and would there be any possibility of deleveraging from here on? Yes, hi. Yes, look, I think there are 2, 3 factors driving all of that debt profile. Clearly, the core operational Free cash flow is the strong driver. On the Mobile India side, which faced acute heat on the EBITDA and free cash flows 2, 3 years ago, The repair has been ongoing and Gopal's commentary talks to you about how that is evolving. That's a significant, should I say, factor in the Evolution of how the free cash flows and their leverage will play out. You can have your own models, but clearly India business by itself is free cash flow positive. As the upgrading and other core business drivers perform, there'll be more FCF at hand, subject to tariff hikes and other strategies that you are separately discussing. The other piece is really around some of the monetization activities. I think that's more event based. Historically, we have talked about What it would mean for leverage if there was, as an example, tower co monetization or if there is any other monetization Like the ones which we did for data center in our equity structure by bringing Carlyle in, some of those activities have been done, some are In play, but they are not deleveraging, should I say triggers, they are triggers by the business by itself to do what is required. And over time, We will, as a corollary, benefit on the deleverage. Tower side, you would have seen what the company did in terms of acquiring additional stake of 5 And in the double go, while in a shorter term that probably means marginal uptick in terms of the cash deployed and leverage. But That's more a financial decision. The stock price was where it was. It reflects our understanding of the implicit value in that stock price. Incidentally, We invested about INR 3,000 crores to acquire 5% stake. And our understanding is with the dividend that Indus has declared last week, RUB 2,000 will be our share of that dividend. So essentially, it's a play around what the value implicit in that share is. The The company continues to be independent and we will evaluate our strategy around how this stock needs to be held over time. And the last piece is around the free cash Close and upstreaming that happened from Africa business. I think Africa businesses posted their results last week, you would have seen that. They have a formalized dividend policy on a Progressive business, so of that also there will be certain shares that will come by RB. And as Air Liquide translates their own strategy of Should I say deleveraging or FX deleveraging around asset sales, all of that will also count towards Input on the India overall consolidated leverage. From where we are, we are well within 3. We've historically guided for staying between 23 that continues our strategy. Saying conservative is more strongly our bias. We have preemptively done the deleveraging by including equity Infusions and dilutions at our end, at this stage, fairly comfortable, both with the business profile, the expected events and from where we are in terms of overall leverage quotient. Thanks, Rajeev. Gopal, the next set of questions are on 5 gs and CapEx. These are from Pranakshatri of Edelweiss. The first question on 5 gs is what will be the timeline for a meaningful 5 gs launch, which is 50% of the population or so, considering we've already demonstrated the technology. And the second question on the CapEx is what should be the CapEx trend going forward given the fact that we had said it will continue to trend down from here on? Yeah. I think that's a good question. I think, firstly, if I just talk on 5 gs, The ecosystem is still nascent. But if I look at devices coming in into India now, About 4% to 5% of device shipments coming into India in the month of December are already 5 gs Compatible. So they are still operate they are operating on the NSA ARC mode, with the 3.5 gigahertz enabled on it. So to that extent, I think you're seeing some movement on 5 gs and this number compared to, let's say, October was 2%. And if you compare to September, it was almost nothing. So there has been a change in some of the shipments coming in. Having said that, the use cases are still nascent, but the fact is that some of these handsets are now beginning to show up. And I would say in the next 12 months, You should start seeing more and more shipments potentially coming in with 5 gs. I think what we have tried to demonstrate through our Hyderabad test is to show the power of our network And demonstrate conclusively that we are our infrastructure is ready. So whether it's our radio network, Our radios on the mid band are all ready for 5 gs. And if you know whether it's dynamic spectrum sharing the DSS mode Or whether it's the alternate mode, which is where you use the anchor band for the uplink and the big capacity band On the sub-six or any other bands on the downlink, both of these will need an overlay of 4 gs and you will need the radios to compatible with this and this is why we demonstrated that our radios are pretty much ready on the 1800 band. We also believe that going forward all spectrum bands We'll be 5 gs ready. So to that extent, like we did on 3 gs, you can kind of refarm spectrum. And this is I'm talking about the next 3 to 5 years, you'll be able to refarm spectrum. The last point I do want to make is on the CapEx. Our understanding is that while 5 gs is a new technology that will come in, The CapEx requirements given the readiness overall readiness of the network will only be to the extent of the additional radio units That are deployed on any new spectrum band that is deployed, but a lot of the other parts of the CapEx, which is whether it's the transport network, Whether it's on the core side where you're just sort of moving it on a linear basis as you variabilize growth and you get additional growth Are all modular and all very, very linear in their not linear, are flat in terms of their growth rate. So as a consequence, the sum and substance of it is that we don't believe that with a 5 gs introduction that whenever it comes, We're going to see any material change in the CapEx profile because remember that as you invest in 5 gs, you will stop investing In 4 gs, because the capacity creation will be done on 5 gs, which will obviously be a lower cost of producing a gigabyte, given that you have much higher spectrum in those banks. Thanks, Gopal. The next question is from Parag Gupta, Morgan Stanley. Parag wants to know that with Jio likely to come up with a new device strategy sometime this year, how are we thinking about predicting and increasing our market share going forward? Yes, I think this is Well, I can't comment on what our competition will do. We have seen reports about potential Subsidized device in smartphones. We have seen, in fact, in the last few years, we've seen subsidies In India, on the feature phone side with the VoLTE device that was launched by one of our competitors, and we stayed away from that Simply because we believe that a subsidy game is quite a value destructive game, especially at the lower end of the market. India is already a challenged market in terms of its overall financial stretch and business model given the low levels of ROCE. And to actually add a subsidy on top of that, I think will be pretty disastrous for the industry. So this is why we stayed away for it I stayed away from it. And the challenge here or the issue here is that when the subsidy Expires or when the customer is ready to up trade, there is no necessity that the customer stays with the operator that has actually provided the subsidy. So they make their own choice. And that is something that we did see in the last 6 to 9 months. As far as the device subsidy on the smartphone is concerned, We can't comment much on it until we know what it is about. But suffice it to say that we will deploy different levers. We've got A full plan in terms of how we can deal with it, to make sure that we do it smartly, to make sure that we do it in a value accretive way and to make sure that we continue to remain competitive in the marketplace. Thanks, Gopal. Bartel, the next set of questions are for you, there is a question from Eric Liu, who wants to understand a little bit more on the exceptional items that we have booked in the quarter. Hi. The exceptional items can be broadly classified in 3 or 4 broad categories this quarter. The first one, the biggest one of them is because of Indus and Infra Till merger, which got consummated in the current quarter, which was discussed and which was Detailed by Gopal, subsequently, the holding which we had on partly in fact, which was being carried on a cost basis That to be fair value then there is a gain which has been booked on that account. The second item would be in the Q3, typically every year, We reassess our tangible and intangible assets, including DTA for impairment. That is done based as a forecast of 10 years The various lines of business is the legal entities and we have carried out that activity in the current quarter. Business losses have a shelf life of 8 years. Depreciation losses have an unlimited life. Part of the business losses will not be able to consume within the ATRs And the DTA which has been created historically on those business losses have been reversed in the current quarter, which is a normal process which we follow every year. As also mentioned by Gopal, we are upgrading our homes network, which was partially done running on legacy, which is the corporate network, we have taken an accelerated charge due to technological obsolescence of that particular business asset and charge has been taken in the current quarter. Over and above, we regularly assess Tax levies, contractual obligations, regulatory levies on a quarterly basis, looking at various developments and the situations overall, whether it is for us or for competition and on that account, we have taken certain charges in the current account. So net net all this put together, we have a charge, we have a gain of INR 1,000 crores in the current quarter. It's a combination of all these 4, 5 items. Thanks, Pavan. The next set of questions, Gopal, are from Ankur from JPM. He wants to know has there been any change in Airtel's distribution strategy that is driving significant success on gross and net adds versus peers. And secondly, how much of our network is already prepared for a 5 gs sort of a rollout or an upgrade? So I think there are 2 questions there. I would say that I think the question more broadly that you're asking Ankur is what have been the drivers behind our execution. And I would say that there are 3 or 4 things that have driven this. Number 1 is our relentless focus on experience. Our faults are down by almost 60% in the last 15 months. Our network faults are down by around 35% to 40%. Our non network faults are up Down by a much larger number. And this has been made possible by a lot of investment in digital tools. Secondly, investment in smart capacity creation wherever required. So I think this is one part which is experience. The second part is around the brand. We continue to be the most aspirational brand and we are constantly looking to ways to differentiate ourselves. So whether it's a Bank Wallasim Whether it's Airtel, Safeway, all of these are kind of ways by which people feel that Airtel is a more differentiated brand. The third is a very simplified way to go to market, which really focuses every single one of our On roll and off roll people on just 3 metrics and no more than 3 metrics, all of which are tracked at a very, very granular level, Which is down to a site level, down to an outlet level. In fact, we have ways of computing our revenue market share at every single retail outlet across the 1,000,000 outlets So that's the 3rd part, which is measurement and metrics. And the 4th part that I would say is really around micro marketing, Which we have elevated to a next level, there was a time when we would look at our performance only by a circle. So we have 20 operating units. You will look at our performance by each unit. Today, we look at it by 700. Then we started looking at it by 700 districts. Now we look at it by their sales. And in fact, in our circle teams, they look at it at every site level. So there are 210,000 sites. Every single site has a certain number of customers that are being served. We look at the revenue market share by site and sorry, customer market share by site, And we've got surrogate ways to actually capture that through the traffic that actually comes on to our site. So an incredible level of Analytics and granular understanding of what is required to drive performance. Based on this, there are every quarter, there are 1 or 2 major programs that are run where the entire organization is aligned To actually drive a simple go to market agenda. So that's really behind what's happening on the execution. The second question was on, Komal, on on what? There was a question on 5 gs or something. How much of a network which is in the backhaul core radio is already approved into 5 gs? Yes. So I think the transport network is fully future proofed, the The network is fully future proofed. The core network is future proofed. The radio network, a very large part of it is completely future proofed. So I would say a disproportionate part of our network is future proof. Thanks, Gopal. The next set of questions are from Suryan Agayen. He wants to know that our base of wireless data customers has gone up from 45% to 55% in the last year alone. And where do we expect this number to be in the next 2 to 3 years? And secondly, how much more of our networks will be impaired? So how much more value is still left to be impaired in our financials? I think maybe I'll hand that to Badal. Can you just repeat the question on this impairment one? Sure, Badass, the question is how much more of impairment of value is left with regards to specifically 3 gs equipment? Okay, right. No, Surya, I think we had taken impairment of 3 gs close to 6 quarters back, 6 or 7 quarters back. And it was an accelerated charge, which we had taken over a period of 5 quarters when we were kind of shutting our 3 gs network and migrating the entire network. The entire charge of 3 gs network has been taken already in those 5 quarters. In fact, these 5 quarters were finished couple of quarters back. So there was no incremental charge on account of 3 gs, which needs to be taken in our books of accounts. Sorry, Gopal, there was a question on where do we expect the mobile data subs to be over the next 2 to 3 years? I think it's difficult to put out a forecast like that. I mean, even if I had one, I wouldn't want to share it because the next thing you'll do is Ask me, start holding me to a report card against that target. I have that with my boss, so I'll stay with without giving a forecast. The next set of questions are from Rohit Chaudhia. Firstly, he wants to commend the company. On a serious note, Komal, I think there still is a large opportunity to upgrade from feature phones. If you look at the total number of Feature phones in India still, there are potentially about 300 odd 1,000,000 feature phones that still can be upgraded. While these 300,000,000 feature phones are relatively lower level of ARPU in terms of their customer profile, The fact is that many of these phones will get upgraded over the course of the next 3 years. I would imagine that if you take a 5 year view, Most of the 2 gs customers would be would have been upgraded. And I would say a disproportionate part of that revenue would be upgraded in the next 2 to 3 years itself. Gopal, the next set of questions are from Rohit Chaudharyar. Firstly, he wants to commend the company on setting and raising the bar on governance and disclosure. And his question specifically is on 5 gs, would we like to go for bragging rights, which is the 1st network, the largest, the fastest or would we be financially prudent looking for reasonable payback periods. I think, Rohit, the fact is that The reason that we wanted to demonstrate this test in Hyderabad, you could say it was for bragging rights, but I would say it was more To actually prove to ourselves and get our engineers to prove to themselves that our network is fully ready because we've been hearing about this, but we worked on it for about a year To make sure that actually we were able to on a live commercial network in Hyderabad deliver close to 300 Mbps speeds On an existing 4 gs spectrum band, which is the 1800 band where we have 15 megahertz of spectrum, I think that going forward, What that tells us is that given our transport network, our core network and our radio networks are more or less 5 gs ready, the incremental CapEx that we put in We'll in no way actually go up simply because of 5 gs. I think it will get offset from some of that 4 gs. And we are always going to be very smart and Prudent about where we deploy CapEx, we've been doing that right through. And I would say that if you go back and look, let's say, 2 to 3 years ago, we took a big, Big jump in CapEx. In fact, at one stage, CapEx as a percentage of revenue was almost 45%. And at that stage, we just couldn't avoid it because The consumption was going through the roof and we had to balance the fact that we were going to deliver a customer experience that people desired In order to hold on and grow our market share, I think we are past that now. And we are back to being really prudent And sensible about where we deploy CapEx. The interesting thing about the nature of the consumption in wireless is that You will always have the bottom 40%, 50% of sites that have very low levels of consumption. And therefore, this is a modular Type of industry where we look at every single tower and every single site as a factory, Which has to be sweated and where utilization has to be maximized. A related question on 5 gs is that would we whenever we are bidding for the spectrum options for 5 gs, would we like to go for PAN India or would we actually choose and evaluate on a circle by up to basis and could we theoretically have a scenario where only a couple of circles have 5 gs to begin with and rest of the country follows through? I think it's a theoretical question at this stage because we are still far away from it. But suffice it to say that in the long term, you will have 5 gs Everywhere. I don't think that I mean, if you look at 4 gs, I think it must we would have shown you you go back from 2 gs to 3 gs to 4 gs. It's actually surprising, if you go back, let's say, 12 to 15 years, it was surprising to see the adoption of voice and mobile telephony in places like Bihar and UP, Especially in rural areas, the same is now being seen in 4 gs. So I think at the end of the day, this is now an essential service, Which is in the hands of people and already impacts their lives in every way and form whether it's today, whether it's in the frame of payments or productivity or Entertainment or working from home or studying from home. So my own sense is that finally, any technology that we use, In the long term, we will need to be a Pan India national player. In the short term, if you want to optimize The pace of rollout and the pace of adoption, yes, obviously, it will start in urban areas. Any new technology typically starts in urban areas Because the price of the device is the constraint and those tend to be higher in the early years and slowly start getting massified. So that's the modular Type of investment that I referred to earlier. Thanks, Gopal. There is a repeat question there is a follow on question from Ashwin Jain of ICICIpro AMC. He wants to know that in the past couple of quarters, Jio had relaunched its postpaid plans. What impact did we see on our postpaid customer base, both in terms of customers or in terms of the ARPU there? I think We've already disclosed to you that we added close to 700,000 customers in postpaid. Last quarter, we added close to 700,000 Customers, so really in 6 months' time, we've added about 1,500,000 customers on postpaid, which is potentially amongst the highest that we've seen Perhaps in a decade. So I will not be in a position to comment on what our competitors are doing, But our momentum on postpaid has been very strong in the last 6 months. Thanks, Gopal. The next question is from Varun Abuja from Credit Suisse. He wants to understand that the total customer addition of 14,200,000 that we saw this quarter, where are these customers coming from? Are they migrating from other networks? Are these new customers coming on to telephony? And what are the trends that we expect on customer addition and 4 gs net adds over the next 2 to 3 quarters? I think it's been It's a combination of factors as it normally happens in such cases. There are upgrades from our own 2 gs base. There is movement from competitors, a little bit of porting that happens. And there is some set of customers who are also coming new into the category. And particularly with COVID, there has also been an extension of the life of a device. That's an interesting thing that we've seen on the network. The increase in shelf life of a device has almost gone up by around 6 months, 5.5 to 6 months during COVID. And what we are seeing is the same device is being handed down to somebody else either in the family or somebody that's known. It could be A poorer person who a person knows where the phone is handed, and that is also being seen. So We're seeing a combination of all of these factors. The next question, Gopal, is from Sanjesh of ICICI Securities. He wants to know, as far as our digital business is concerned, are these revenues being booked separately at the moment? What is the contribution of the digital businesses in the overall revenue scheme? And what is driving the digital business revenues, is it more partnership? Is it more ads? Is it more commissions? I think like I said on our digital strategy, I think the Flywheel really has 3 parts to it. 1 is the impact on our core business. I think there's a very material impact on Improvement in customer experience and reduction in cost. So today, almost 50% of our acquisitions are on broadband or online, About 25% of our postpaid acquisitions are online and these are all incremental over and above what was happening offline. So that's been a strong driver. Secondly, about 50 More than 50% of our payments and collections are online. That lowers our cost as well. And thirdly, Many of our complaints and customer interactions are shifting online. We've invested in small startups that have given us speech recognition technology That is frankly as good as the best in the world where we are able to interact with customers through bots And that is also lowering costs. So there's one part which is about lowering of costs and improving experience. The second part is actually products that we're building ourselves. I talked about Airtel IQ. We have Just a shade under 50 customers already literally in the last few months. These are amongst the largest companies, companies like Swiggy, companies like HDFC, All on our platform of Airtel IQ and we are adding logos as we speak every single week. And then of course there are partnerships Which is things like Airtel Secure, Airtel Cloud, could be our content side where we are now starting to monetize through subscriptions. Wink subscription service, in fact, we've just launched a subscription service with Wink, which is bundled together with a data plan As also partnerships, for example, with Amazon or Zee or Hotstar on the content side, on the B2B side with Cisco and so on. So I think it's a Combination of 3 things. 1 is the impact on the core business, which is material the new products that we are building where we are seeing serious traction And we'll get material over time. And the partnership part, which is the commission side, where I think, frankly, It comes at a very low CapEx or actually no CapEx. It's just, let's say, topping on the top of your existing platform Where we have access to the one of the 4 strengths data payments distribution network. At this stage, we are still not ready to disclose or Provide revenues out of the entire digital piece, but we do believe that we will at some stage and we believe also that this will start getting More and more material over the next few quarters. So, Gopal, the next set of questions are on the AGR matter. Is there any status or any update on the revision of AGR dues that we can provide to the investors. I think it's still very early to say. We have filed an appeal in the Supreme Court And this appeal is predicated on the errors apparent, that were there, both in terms of calculation errors, Omission errors, some basic clerical errors. And our submission is to not challenge so much the principle of the AGR, Which the Supreme Court has already decided, but really request the court to take, to direct the DOT To look at these errors and consider these errors, which are simply basic clerical errors. We haven't yet the matter has not yet been listed for hearing. So we are not in a position to comment anything beyond that. Thanks, Gopal. Harshief, the next set of questions are around dividend. Samuel from Bernstein wants to know if there is any dividend guidance that we can provide? I think Airtel has historically maintained a smaller dividend paying track record. Over the last few years for a variety number of reasons, the leverage has been on the slightly higher side. We discussed that earlier. So for now, the guidance is that the Dividend receipts that Airtel will get from our tower company, Airtel Africa, any small dividends coming from our Hexacom joint venture, They should predominantly be used to reduce leverage. That probably is the best use. That said, I think a small amount token that has been historically continuing, the board Continues to review that and I'm hoping that can continue. But in the shorter term, leverage reduction is the larger, should I say, agenda of the underlying dividend receipt. Sachin, in the same vein, there are a few questions around asset divestments. Are there any plans to reduce or monetize stake in Frika, and same for Ingest Towers, what is the plan from here on? I think Edel Africa By itself is doing what it is doing, their results are out in public. Airtel India through our Mauritius subsidiaries hold 56 Over time, do we have more room to be able to divest? Theoretically, yes. At this stage, there is no Certain plan of anything like that, it continues to be a large revenue and or growth plus profitability engine for the overall little equity that all of On the tower side, we briefly mentioned, clearly, the short term decision of having increased the stake was more financial in a way, Also reflective of our understanding of what the intrinsic value of that particular per share is. As I mentioned earlier, 66% of our investment has come or will come back shortly in the next 10 days as a dividend receipt. Otherwise, I think as the operator ecosystem evolves and reflects out in the tower co business model, Which includes how what happens to the other operators in terms of their strategy and overall evolution, including footprint and thereby Tower tenancies, plus also how the price response to that will determine how Airtel should think on that. Strategically, the independence of the tower go is not getting questioned. I think that's how the teams have been built there. Chairman is independent. They are driving their combined business strategy both across infidel and Indus. I think that stays as is. And clearly the operator ecosystem, how that What the tenancy profile is? How the price response? Our strategy will be determined by that. The good news is historically, we may have been, Shall I say dependent on this monetization decision for our leverage management? Today, that dependency has gone. So it allows the flexibility of deciding what the best strategy to own, control, manage, drive this asset, which I think Airtel has now. Thanks, Sujit. Gopal, the next question is from Hari Shyamsuntha from Franklin Templeton. He wants to know that after falling for to a low last quarter, mobile churn again seems to have picked up. Any insights into why? I think, Badal, you it's not material. I mean it's Yes, it's around 1.9%, a marginal pickup from 1.7%. But if you look at a long term perspective, mobile channel has always been on the north of 2.2, 2.3, 2.5. That has been the range of mobile channel. So these Short term movements here and there are just pure market dynamics. There's nothing much to read into it. Sure. Thanks, Batil. Gopal, the next question is from N. Srinivas. He wants an update on the 1 Airtel plans. What proportion of our customer base has moved to the plan and what the impact on ARPU and churn. Yes, I think it's still early days, Srinivas. I don't think we are in a position to disclose right now how many customers we have, but it's quite material. We are seeing an upside in ARPU as well. We are seeing additionally at least once extra service come in. And at the home level, the upside in ARPU is close to INR 500 to INR 600. So as this expands In its presence, this could become a very interesting play. And like I mentioned, I think we'll talk more about this in the coming months. Gopal, there's a follow on question from Kunal Borak, who wants to know what are your thoughts on the satellite broadband and whether it has the potential to disrupt mobile telephony in the long term. I think the satellite Technologies will always be a complement to existing wireless and wired technologies. And the reason for that is that the Spectral spectrum that is available and the backhaul that is needed to actually deliver through satellite We'll never ever compare to terrestrial networks. I think that is that you have to be very clear about that. Therefore, it's only a complementary approach. Our own view is that the satellite kind of technologies will be Usable in very remote locations where wireless or terrestrial technologies have not been able to reach. It could be the high seas. It could be on remote forests or in mountains. It could also be in places where there is a need for ubiquitous connectivity, Particularly when there is very, very low levels of data consumption, for example, machine to machine applications, it could be fleet management Where trucks are going from remote locations and coming back into cities. And so in order to actually have Seamless connectivity where the consumption is a few kilobytes These are the kind of technologies that we'll add. So I think you have to see satellite technologies given the current physics, the current characteristics of the physics, The spectrum and the backhaul that is needed that these will be complementary technologies. Thanks, Gopal. In the interest of time, I'll take one last question. This is from Sumit Sarkar. He wants to know that despite the strong net adds, both the DTH and Homes revenue has not increased substantially. And what is the outlook on these businesses? Yeah, I think Badal maybe you can cover this. Yeah. So as it was Mentioned by Gopal that we had taken certain pricing correction in the homes broadband business. And There were the adoption of the downward revision was done in the current quarter majority and there will be some flow through is going to happen in the next quarter. And that's the only reason we are seeing a slight pressure on the broadband business. DTM business on a sequential basis has actually grown I'll speak on 4% and we will continue and that's just the base flow through which continues to happen. Thank you. With this, I'd like to hand back to Gopal for his closing remarks, please. Thank you, Komal. As I have said before, our strategy is the same, win quality customers by giving them an exceptional experience. Do this by building an aspirational brand and in an efficient way. Finally, wrap everything we do through digital, omnichannel and with scale. As we do this, deliver meaningful services to our customers, both the ones we build as well as those we offer through partnerships. Thank you very much and look forward to seeing you next quarter. Thank you, Gopal. Thank you everyone for joining this call. With this, we will end the event now. Thank you.