Good afternoon ladies and gentlemen. I'm Vaidehi Sharma, the moderator for this webinar. Welcome to Bharti Airtel Limited and Bharti Hexacom Limited first quarter ended 30th June 2025 earnings webinar. Present with us today is the senior leadership team of Bharti Airtel and Bharti Hexacom Limited. I must remind you that the overview and discussions today may include certain forward-looking statements that must be viewed in conjunction with the risks that we face. Post the Management Opening Remarks, we will open up for an interactive Q&A session. Interested participants may click on the 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 that they find a place in the queue. Upon announcement of name, participants are to kindly click on Unmute Myself in the pop-up screen and start asking the question post introduction.
With this, now I would like to hand over to Mr. Gopal Vittal for his opening remarks.
Thank you, Vaidehi. A very warm welcome to everyone for our earnings call for the first quarter ended FY 2026. With me, I also have Shashwat, Soumen, Harjeet, Naval, and Akhil. Today's call will focus on our first quarter performance along with an update on some of our key strategic priorities. We're making good progress on our ESG commitments by embedding technology and digital innovation at the heart of our operations. Very targeted initiatives. 64% of our sites are now green, and nearly half the electricity consumed in our data centers comes from renewable sources. Our diversity agenda continues to advance. Women represent just under 19% of our total workforce, up from 11% two years ago. Our remote work program has also enabled qualified women in smaller towns to take on tech roles. The Airtel Foundation has amplified its impact through the introduction of the Airtel Scholarship.
This is a fully funded nationwide initiative designed to empower talented students from diverse backgrounds to pursue undergraduate technology courses. Women make up 51% of the scholars supported thus far, reflecting our commitment to foster gender equality in education and providing equal opportunities for all. A quick word on our financial performance. We delivered another quarter of consistent performance. Consolidated revenue came in at INR 49,463 Crores, just under INR 500 Crores shy of INR 49,500 Crores. This was impacted by a decline in the B2B segment as I had mentioned earlier. This is in line with our guidance which I gave earlier to peel off our low margin revenue in B2B. India revenues excluding Indus Towers came in at about INR 33,820 Crores, and EBITDAL, which is stripped off these obligations, margins came in at 51.4%, improving by 65 basis points sequentially.
The operating free cash flow, which is EBITDAL minus CapEx, was at INR 11,928 Crores. We continue to deleverage our balance sheet. During the quarter, we redeemed senior notes worth $1 billion. Disciplined CapEx spending and operational excellence underpins our solid balance sheet. India net debt to EBITDAL now stands at 1.3. Our approach to financial prudence and the consequent strong balance sheet is recognized by leading agencies, the most recent being the credit rating upgrade that came in from Crisil. Our clear and simple strategy of portfolio premiumization and razor-sharp execution is driving strong performance across our businesses. Mobile saw yet another quarter of industry-leading revenue growth. Broadband is seeing strong growth momentum with FWA expanding the addressable market for us. Our IPTV ramp up is progressing as planned with encouraging response from our customers.
Network expansion is happening as planned with about 1,830 network sites and over 8,300 km of fiber deployed during the quarter. We are future proofing our network with accelerated fiber deployment reflected in over 130,000 km fiber rollout in the last three years. We continue to expand fiber home passes for our broadband services along with FWA rollout across 2,500 cities. Let me share a quick update on each of our segments in mobile. We added 1.2 million customers to our overall base and 3.9 million smartphone data customers. Postpaid net adds remain steady at 0.7 million, accounting for 57% of total net additions. You will recall that the base of postpaid is only 7% of our customer base. ARPU at INR 250 had the benefit of one day extra in the quarter and continued underlying mix improvement.
We further strengthened our entertainment experience for our prepaid customers by launching an industry first all in one OTT entertainment pack with access to over 25 OTT platforms. I do want to reiterate that feature phone to smartphone upgrades, prepaid to postpaid upgrades, data monetization, and international roaming continue to be central to our growth. In the absence of any tariff repair, our 5G expansion continues as planned. We ended the quarter with 152 million 5G customers. We continue to believe that 5G handset adoption at the bottom end of the market will accelerate with the launch of more affordable options. 5G shipments continue to grow and now account for 86% of total smartphone shipments. Our share in the 5G shipment is constantly growing. 5G sites already cater to 36% of the total network traffic, enabling some traffic offload from the existing 4G sites as well.
In the broadband business we delivered, with the highest ever quarterly net adds of 939,000. We're seeing strong momentum in FWA net adds of 540,000. I believe this momentum on the overall broadband business should continue to see acceleration. In digital TV we lost around 200,000 customers during the quarter, but the decline was somewhat compensated by the step up in IPTV net adds. DTH net adds were impacted by structural changes that we initiated to eliminate subsidies on a set top box. We believe this move will pay off well with very strong cash generation. Our competition has also followed us and reduced the box subsidies. Our IPTV is seeing strong acceptance from customers as it delivers a better experience and convenience combined with a very, very solid and expensive content slate. In the Airtel business segment, we reported revenues of about INR 5,060 Crores.
Discontinuation of the commoditized low margin business is not fully reflected on the base, and what you'll see going forward is really underlying growth. If you look at the underlying revenue growth stripped off the discontinued commoditized business, they grew at 2% sequentially, and the business outlook continues to be strong with strong visibility on funnel and the order book. We're seeing some early signs or green shoots in our global business. During the quarter, we won multiple deals in our IoT and security business. On the digital businesses, we're strengthening our digital portfolio across cloud, cybersecurity, financial services, IoT, and CPaaS. With continued strategic investments, Agile Finance is shaping up well with acceleration in loan disbursements and credit card issue. Our partnership with several NBFCs is going as planned with increased supply, all of it now integrated into Airtel. Thanks. We are seeing continued improvement in offtake.
Our Payments Bank monthly transacting users stood at 98 million. Annualized revenue run rate is now over INR 3,100 Crores, growing over 27% year- on- year. Deposits remain strong at about INR 3,750 Crores, growing 29% year- on- year. A quick update on Africa – constant currency revenue growth continues to remain strong at 6.7% sequentially, and this was also helped by favorable currency movement, which led to a solid reported revenue growth of 6.2% sequentially. EBITDAL was INR 4,456 Crores with a margin just under 37%. The balance sheet remains solid with net debt to EBITDAL of under 1. Let me now briefly comment on each of our areas of focus. The first area is really the continued focus on building a diverse and resilient portfolio. The underlying performance now across the portfolio was strong. Africa accounts for 24% of revenues, India mobile at 55%, and India non-mobile at 13%.
Indus now at 8%. Our investments are channelized towards building future-ready digital networks and digital services to accelerate growth across our portfolio. The second area of focus is to win quality customers. Let me start with broadband. As I mentioned earlier, we see a large opportunity, a penetration opportunity in homes. Our investments are now prioritized to capitalize on this growth. We continue to focus on three areas: deepening our network and market footprint, and therefore we're accelerating rollout of fiber home passes and want to get to a quarterly run rate of INR 2.5 billion. Home pass up from 1.6 million, this will drive the addressable market further by expanding our footprint where we are unable to get fiber. Second, we are focused on providing exceptional value to our customers through bundling content and driving conversions.
We partnered with Google to bring a compelling Google One cloud storage subscription service to our customers. This will help them address the mounting challenges of limited device storage. All our postpaid and Wi-Fi customers will get access to 6 months of 100GB Google One Cloud Storage at no extra cost. The third area of focus is expanding our channel footprint, which I spoke to you about a few quarters ago. This is now in place and is allowing us to drive cross-selling at an accelerated pace. We now intend to leverage our data-driven precision targeting, enhance our persuasion, and strengthen analytics to scale the impact of our expanded channel strategy. A quick word on the mobile services business. Our focus to drive ARPU improvement continues to be underpinned by sustained postpaid upgrades, smartphone upgrades, and penetration of international roaming.
We further simplified our IR plans to deliver greater value and convenience to our customers. Our rural expansion, over 43,500 sites deployed in the last three years, is delivering on all action standards. We've now intensified our efforts to sweat our deployment in areas that are not fully utilized to drive sustained share gains. Let me now spend some time on B2B. We believe our network investments need to be geared to building gold standard, flapless, and reliable fiber networks. Our infrastructure comprising of low latency fiber, submarine cables, OPGW fiber, and advanced data centers is the backbone of our superior service, quality, and assurance. As a result, we're now stepping up our investments to drive growth in core connectivity. We've made substantial investments in OPGW capacities connecting all metros and major cities.
In addition, we triggered a significant investment nine months ago to connect data centers and cable landing stations in Mumbai and Chennai on the submarine cables and capacities. We've invested over INR 2,000 Crores over the last five years, and we expect a further light up from 45 Tbps capacity to 180 terabytes per second capacity. All of this is now playing out in the data segment growth that we see at the same time. As I mentioned earlier, the bulk of the incremental growth for the industry in B2B is happening in adjacencies, cybersecurity, IoT, and cloud. In each of these areas, we're continuing to invest and seeing traction. The digital segment is now growing at 23%. Today I want to spend some time on the largest growth area within digital, which is cloud. You would have seen our recent announcements made on the 4th of August.
Let me give you a little bit of texture on this. Over the last five years, Airtel has changed significantly. Our digital capabilities, based on a comprehensive benchmarking with large telcos around the world, are truly world class. Our capabilities can be essentially summed up in the way we think about our business, that it's a platform above all else. Let me explain to you how it works. It really works across three layers. At the foundational layer, which is our first layer, is the data layer. This is truly the secret sauce. Besides a massive data infrastructure, we've built a homegrown data engine. We call it a data engine, which allows us to ingest data, monitor data, measure the data, catalog the data, and leverage over 3,000 attributes relating to every single customer. All of it automatically done with no human intervention.
This data engine also has a next best action algorithm that provides the intelligence to all our channels on what action we need to take for that individual customer, whether to offer a service or solve a problem that they may have. The whole of the data engine is linked to our second layer, which we call our workflow platform, which really helps customers to do the four things that they want to do with us in any business: buy something, we bill them for it, they pay for it, and we serve them. Finally, all of this is exposed in the third layer on our Channels platform to our customers across every single touch point. Whether it's the call center, it's the web, it's the app, it's the storefront, or it's at the home, through our engineer we have one unified presentation layer which we call the Channel layer.
This entire stack has been built by our engineering group and is homegrown using open source software. It operates at a massive scale of 1.4 billion transactions per minute. All of this sits on our own cloud platform which is managed and hosted in India. Our cloud handles over 250 petabytes of data, managing over 10,000 servers across our 14 large and 120 edge data centers. As you can see, all of this is at a mega scale. It's telco grade and it's hosted in the country. I can also tell you that as a cloud for an individual company in this country, this is clearly the largest cloud instance. We've now extended all of these capabilities to our customers.
We launched Airtel Cloud and we believe this will allow our customers to get access to a world-class cloud which is telco grade, hosted and held in India, and additionally save them costs. Over and above this, we've also now extended our software platforms globally to telcos to start with. By the way, we do believe that our platforms can go beyond the telco since they're built on a totally modular basis. This is why we've been able to extend our platforms in a totally fungible way both across geographies and sectors. For example, we extended it to Airtel Africa which is a subsidiary. We extended to Indus Towers which is a totally different type of business. We've also extended it to Airtel Payments Bank which is again a very different type of business. I'm also pleased that we won deals with Singtel and Globe Telecom in the Philippines.
These are not part of the group and this is a measure of the credibility that we've been able to build. More conversations with several telcos are in the pipeline. I believe the launch of the cloud and software platform business can truly change the composition of Airtel B2B and broadly even Airtel in the years to come. The third pillar of our strategy is the obsession to deliver a brilliant customer experience. All our digital capabilities are now coming to bear on serving customers. Whether it is go-to-market lifecycle management, customer experience, driving personalization, or improving productivity for our fleet, this impacts all of it.
As I mentioned before, this allows us to track the experience of our customers at a device level as well as provide tools to our frontline on the experience delivered within a very, very small micro market of 100 meter by 100 meters across the country. India has now well over a million micro markets and we measure the performance within each micro market. We also believe one of the drivers of our market share outperformance is really this. We've now extended these tools into Airtel Africa, and you can see that the results are already visible. Our Anki spam solution continues to provide significant relief to our customers. Our tool, as you know, detects scam and spam and alerts our customers in real time in their own language.
Whether these calls or messages originate on SMS or on any OTT platforms, whether they originate in India or abroad, our tool works. We continue to add features to our tool. We've added a cutting-edge solution that detects and blocks malicious websites across all communication, OTT apps and platforms, including emails and browsers, in real time, giving total peace of mind for our customers while browsing the Internet. Since its launch, the solution has identified over 42 billion spam calls. The fourth pillar of our strategy is to build and leverage our digital capabilities. While I've already spent considerable time today on this, I do want to make two points here today. The first is AI. On AI, we've done numerous experiments, much as most large companies have in various parts of the world.
The change we are now bringing about is to put AI at the very heart of our business. What we're doing is to now place AI at the very center of all the digital platforms that we've already built and are running at scale. We feel this will take our capabilities to the next level. More about this in the coming quarters as we see it coming to fruition. The second area I want to talk about is our belief. While we will continue to build tools and solutions that we need for our business, as you've seen, we will also leverage the capabilities of partners to help scale our business and provide our customers a distinct advantage. There are three that I will illustrate today. On content, we have a slate of the most compelling content covering 25 OTT apps in India.
Within the Extreme platform, we have a partnership with Amazon, we have a partnership with Disney, we have a partnership with Netflix, we have a partnership with Zee, and we are exclusively available on Apple. A second example is our partnership with Google that allows us to offer complementary cloud storage to our broadband customers. The last example is our breakthrough partnership with Perplexity that empowers our customers with innovative technology and cutting-edge AI capabilities. We're seeing strong customer engagement within a few days of the launch and have already climbed over 5 million and growing every day. The fifth and last pillar of our strategy is water waste. As I mentioned earlier, this is fully wired into our operation. We started the year on a strong note with a funnel, and we are on track to achieve our client sales.
To sum up, overall we delivered another quarter of strong performance. We continue to see meaningful growth opportunities in postpaid, in broadband, in convergence, and B2B. Our investments are now directed towards capitalizing these growth opportunities. All of this is really done by keeping digital at the core. Lastly, we take great pride in our flawless governance track record, spirit of ownership and entrepreneurial spirit that is ingrained in our culture, and the quality and transparency of our disclosures. With this, let me hand back to Vaidehi. Thank you very much, Gopal. 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 analysts and investor community only due to time constraints. We would request if you could limit the number of questions to two per participant to enable more participation. Interested participants may click on the Raise Hand option on your Zoom application to join the Q& A queue. Upon announcement of name, participants are 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 3:30 P.M. as the management will start the Q& A discussion on Bharti Hexacom from 3:30 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.
Thank you. Hi, good afternoon. Thank you so much for taking my questions. Gopal, as always, thank you so much for that comprehensive overview about the business in your opening remarks. First question is on CapEx. Last year the India wireless business in particular did about $2.5 billion of CapEx, and while there could be some seasonality in the June quarter, it looks like for the full year the CapEx may be trending down again in fiscal 2026. If you were to take a slightly longer-term view, the next technology refresh cycle may be a few years away still. The wireless business in particular, are there any particular reasons why in the
foreseeable future at least, the CapEx will or has to move higher?
Should we expect that for the next 3, 4, 5 years the CapEx will probably remain range bound, and then on the non-wireless side you talked about a few things, FTTH and FWA focus, and also cloud more recently. What does that translate into CapEx for s ome of these businesses d irectionally.
Do the CapEx in these businesses go up before they start coming down? That's my first question.
Thank you. I think firstly this quarter's CapEx has been low. The way that I would urge you to look at it, Manish, is look at it over quarter four and quarter one. You have sort of ups and downs in a particular quarter, so you average that out. That's the sort of run rate that you're currently operating at. You're right in the assumption that radio CapEx generally is trending down. At the same time, when you look at transport CapEx, the investments that are going in on fiber on our core networks, they continue because that is linked to our quest to connect more and more sites to fiber, upgrading our transport infrastructure, and also running on our core networks based on the capacities and the bandwidth that they consume. The non-wireless CapEx, if you look at it, the B2B business gets its fair share of CapEx.
That's normal. The data centers get their fair share of CapEx. Homes continues to get its fair share. I think the one thing that I would say on cloud is that it's on modular CapEx. We have already invested in the cloud. We've got now two regions running and they're live, one in Delhi and the other in Chennai. We will open up a third region at some point in time, but as of now there are two regions running and this has enough headroom for us to continue to fill out those capacities. If they do fill out those capacities, then it's really effectively a three to six month time frame for us to install more capacities. Remember, we also have a data center business, which is Nextra, which is in the middle of building our data centers, and so space will always be available.
Thank you. My second and maybe related question is just on the free cash presentation of the India business excluding towers. Again, continues to t rend like really strongly, maybe more than $1 billion of CapEx every quarter. Now just two subcomponents of that question. One, AGR payments start for you in March of this year. What are your expectations around it at this point in time? The second bit is just on shareholder payouts. How are you thinking about that given just maybe the moderation in radio CapEx in the wireless business and the strong free cash flow generation in the overall India business?
On the AGR payments, we have written to the government, as you know, to be extended the same relief as any other telco, and that is a decision that the government has to take. We will abide by whatever decision they take to that extent. I would say that we have the room to make whatever payments are required on the overall strength of the balance sheet because the debt position is getting better, and there is a lot of free cash that will get generated over time. We've always maintained that our dividends will increase, our leverage goes down, and we'll continue to look for opportunities to grow our business in market around the adjacencies that we're operating in. Whether it's in cloud or security, these are areas that we certainly continue to look at. Data centers, we'll keep looking at it.
There's nothing to report as of now, but those are active conversations, not conversation, active sort of work that is going on behind the scenes to identify opportunities.
Thank you. I'll jump back in the queue.
The next question comes from Mr. Piyush Choudhary. Mr. Choudhary, you may please unmute your side, introduce yourself, and ask your question now.
Good afternoon. Thanks for the opportunity and the remarks initially. This is Piyush from HSBC. Two questions. Gopal, you talked about the value proposition of Airtel Cloud and software solutions. How should we think about potential of these services in India and abroad? If you can share some color on the size of the contracts that you signed with Singtel, Globe Telecom, what's the kind of margin profile and CapEx required in these businesses as you scale it up? Second question is on home broadband. One of your peers is providing services using FWA. What is your view on this technology and would Bharti be looking to offer such service?
Yeah. Thank you, Piyush. I think, you know, both on. Let me start with the cloud. I think this is a very large market. It's also growing rapidly in the market that we are playing in and the services that we're offering. We estimate that this market could well be in the ballpark of INR 60,000 Crores. As I mentioned before, this is an ocean that we're playing in. It's also growing very rapidly. For us to pick up any market share, there will be a substantial contribution to the B2B business. I think that's the first point. The second point on software is that that is an even bigger ocean because you've got, you know, so many telcos around the world and then of course there are other sectors. To start with, even in telcos is huge opportunity.
This, as you recall, this, as you know, is a product that we built for ourselves. It's got a roadmap that is ongoing for the next several years that will keep getting better and better. For example, I mentioned that we're going to put AI at the heart of it. That is going to come in the releases in coming quarters and therefore I do believe that the development effort that is going in on the software business is a development effort that's going in for Airtel India . The subsidiary that we have set up, which is Excelify, where all our people are housed, is anyway supporting Airtel . When you take this to market, which typically, you know, you have multimillion dollar deals over five years, there's a typically software business. It's just like a SaaS business where you're licensing software.
The margins are very, very good and there's barely any CapEx. It's largely some managed services that you need to deploy to integrate the software. We're very excited that we're playing in a very large market. This is now up to how we look at our own capabilities, which is where the gap is in terms of go to market and so on in order to strengthen our whole business. That's really where our focus is. We're currently working on how do we ratchet out our go to market capabilities because remember we've not done this kind of selling motion. We've done mostly connectivity and messaging type of sales. This is an area where we are now focused on to ratchet up our capabilities. On UBR, just to give you a little color on this, UBR is really using the Wi-Fi band to provide connectivity.
This is used in the B2B space through the, you know, sort of links that get provided. One of the challenges, particularly in dense urban areas, is there's a very high degree of interference. Even if you have interference mitigating solutions, you end up with high churn and you end up with poor experience where the density of the customer base is very low. On fixed broadband, UVR could definitely work. We have done a lot of trials with this UVR piece and we will see where to deploy it if we have to, but it will certainly not be in dense server. The second point I would make is that we've already got a 5G investment that's played out in mobile and fixed wireless access is just a topping on the cake.
It doesn't require any incremental CapEx on the radio side and you can use that to monetize the investment. That's an area of focus. I would continue to underscore that actually the best way to connect the home is through fiber. Our focus is to actually step up more and more fiber home parcels, which I mentioned. We are actually glad that in the last three months of this first quarter of this year, our fiber homes that we are connecting through fiber has actually ratcheted up growth. If you take the total Wi-Fi number of 930,000, fiber is actually pushing ahead with very, very fast growth and NSWA compliments. That's really how we think of UVR and the delivery medias.
Very clear, Gopal. Thank you very much.
The next question comes from Sachin Salgaonkar. Mr. Salgaonkar, you may please unmute your side, introduce yourself, and ask your question now.
This is Sachin Salgaonkar from Bank of America. I have two questions. First question is on the enterprise business or Airtel business. Gopal, just wanted to understand the key drivers out here which would drive the underlying growth for the business and what kind of a steady state growth and margin should we expect in the medium term. I'm not talking about, you know, at a time when the business is, let's say, scaling up, just wanted to understand opportunity out here. Second question is a follow up question on the CapEx. Now, typically we look at global telcos CapEx to sales hovers anywhere between 13%- 16% depending upon whether it's an emerging market or a developed market. For Airtel , we are seeing, and of course this quarter could be a bit of anomaly, but close to around 11%.
On an annual basis, the numbers are coming down from 30%- 20% as we go ahead where most of the radio CapEx is done and we don't need any technology led investments. If I move towards a 6G or any other technology, what is the steady state CapEx to sales number we need to keep in mind in commensurate, and this is more specifically for a wireless versus, let's say, the non wireless one.
Thanks.
On Airtel business, if you look at the drivers of growth, we think of the business as having five sort of broad segments. One is connectivity, which has historically been our bread and butter. Margins here are very good, in fact better than what we report as the overall margin for the business because this is what we manufacture ourselves. The underlying market growth here has now slowed down to maybe 4% or 5%, and while we are getting faster growth in the market, that's the reality that we have confronted with. The second segment that we look at is IoT. Here we have a market share of almost 60%, and we are clearly winning the segment. This is a very fast-growing segment.
We've seen massive fit out of meters into smart meters and electricity in homes, and as the discoms, or the distribution companies, have sort of upgraded their infrastructure. There are opportunities around auto, there are opportunities around fleet tracking. This is a business that will only grow. If you look at the total IoT customer base that we would typically have now, it would be in the ballpark of about 50 million and growing rapidly. The third area is, and again here the margins are very good because again this is our core business. The third area is really the wholesale business, which is what I would call largely messaging, both domestic, international, incoming, voice. Here the margins are under pressure and the margins are low. It's a trading business and we have exited the very low margin business in this area.
The rest of the business has a better margin profile. It's really riding on your existing networks and the headwinds that you face here are the shift away from SMS to OTT platforms or in-app notifications or even just rate pressures. The fourth area is security. This is largely through partnerships. It requires very little CapEx. Just to let you know, we invested about INR 100 Crores a few years ago on the SOC. We've not put in major investments since then. Business is growing nicely, but the margins are low because the CapEx is not required here. It's more a partnership business where we sort of wrap around products and then offer our SOC solution on top. You come to cloud. In the cloud, if we were doing what many telcos do, which is just reselling public clouds, then your margins would be very low.
We didn't want to be in that business because that's a commoditized business and a very crowded space. We've got our own cloud here. The margins are very good, but it requires CapEx and, as I said, this is modular CapEx. That's really the way that this business is. Connectivity growing softly as an industry, IoT exploding, cloud really growing in a big way and massive market, security growing rapidly, and messaging and wholesale under pressure. Now I come to CapEx. The question on CapEx that I would ask is, if you look at the CapEx that we have put in over the last four, five years, we've hovered around, we had a couple of high years in the INR 30,000 odd Crores region. The reason that we were doing that, we were just investing rapidly. At that point, our revenues were low because our ARPUs were even lower.
The percentages are high and it's come down now as a percentage. The CapEx, while it's peeled off, has not peeled off as much as the percentages have dropped. This really comes to the question of CapEx to revenue ultimately, and therefore the revenue is as important as the CapEx. Where does the revenue come from? The revenue will come from incremental ARPUs. The revenue will come from more volume-led growth of customers, and finally it'll come from tariff repair. All of those are also factors. We do not expect major cycles of new radio CapEx that will happen, that's going to trend down. It's only CapEx that's going into some of the new growth areas which I've already talked about.
Thank you. Very clear. Just a small follow-up on the enterprise business. Clearly five different businesses. Every business has a different set of competition on a broad-based basis. Are we seeing competitive intensity stable, increasing, or decreasing across the board?
I think it's difficult to comment in those terms. I think in connectivity you have the big players, you also have some of the newer players coming in, but that market is maybe four or five players. In messaging, everything rides in the telco network, but you've got a lot of aggregators sitting there, and then on cloud, you know there are the public cloud players as well few other Indian domestic players. IoT is really just, you know, the telco, and security is a crowded space, but security needs a different kind of capability set and requires you to have credibility and trust with customers. I guess it's a mixed bag.
All right, thank you.
All the best.
The next question comes from Mr. Sanjesh Jain. Mr. Jain, you may please unmute your side, introduce yourself, and ask your question now.
Hi Gopal.
Thanks, thanks. I got few first on the site addition itself this quarter. Site addition probably is a five-year slow. We had a great run last few years, thanks to the rural expansion distribution-led scheme, which was giving us that market share win. Do you think to that extent, when we were doing because of distribution-led benefit, will taper off with the expansion now slowing down?
I think that you know I can't comment on a target or forecast of how this will actually play out, but we do believe there's still a lot of opportunity, Sandesh, because we do believe that there are several sites that we have rolled out. We rolled out about 45,000 sites in the last few years. There are several sites where our utilization is low. While at an aggregate we met our action standards, there are several sites, several sectors, several areas where our utilization is low. If you put that together, that is like another big year of rollout. We really need to sweat that. There are actions that are currently underway, not just sweating it, but also redeploying in some places where the sites may not be making as much sense and we may have made a few mistakes off the ground. I think that's really the focus.
Second is that I do believe that one of the opportunities that we have within our business is to continue to see gains in ARPU and the drivers of ARPU continue to remain intact. Like I mentioned to you, the penetration of international roaming is still abysmally low. The penetration of postpaid is still very low. While we are adding close to 60% of net adds in postpaid, the fact is that the base is only 7, 7.5%. We've got 90 million credit approved users who could be on postpaid. You know, and then feature phones, you still have 70, 75 million feature phones on our network that are ready to upgrade to smartphones. The headroom for ARPU continues to be there, and it's a function of how well we are able to persuade and execute users to actually move into some of these areas that I talked about.
No, fair enough. We can see the ARPU growth.
I was just looking at this distribution.
Both those add up to market share. That is why I talked about ARPU also
Sanjesh
Got it. Got it.
The second question on the FWA, again, if I look at the market share for FWA, we are at 18%.
How do you see this market share c hanging in our favor in next few years and what are we doing to address it? We look at FTTH including FWA as one segment when you look at market share.
Yes, absolutely. We look at FTTH and fiber as one segment. We call it Wi-Fi. We go to market as Wi-Fi. We don't care whether the customer is on fiber or FWA as long as we get Wi-Fi. We do plan at the back that if we've got fiber in that particular place, we want the customer to be on fiber because that's a better, better quality connectivity. At the front, therefore, we keep it very simple. If you walk into the store and say I want Wi-Fi, say where do you want it? Do a check. If there's fiber, you will get fiber first. If there's fixed wireless access, you will get fixed wireless access. If there's neither, you get nothing. The fact is that when the frontline person is talking to the user, to the customer, they're having one conversation on Wi-Fi, they're not having conversation on technology.
Therefore, we are not fussed about, you know, not winning on FWA. We are first about winning on Wi-Fi. I think that's our singular metric that we want to chase. Whichever way it comes, we want to win the Wi-Fi game. I would say that the momentum on Wi-Fi has been strong with 930,000 as I mentioned and we are continuing to grow the momentum. My sense is that even July, which we finished, has been better than June so we should see continued momentum. The second is that we want to see a drop in churn and we're not happy with some of the issues that we're facing on experience relating to our transport hygiene and infrastructure. A lot of work is going on there to fix that so that our churn goes down. It's still very good.
I mean still, you know, it's still, I would say, industry beating, but we still need to do a better job. Thirdly, we have various ways to measure our market share and our relative performance which is not just based on the reported numbers to TRAI but also based on what we see light up on digital platforms which are run by very large OTT companies. We are happy with the progress that we made in terms of market share as well.
Got it.
Got one related question. This quarter the CapEx intensity in the home was around 85%. Can you help us understand what really the CapEx means in the home segment? It is the modem which we put in or CPE which we put in the customer side. Is that the one constitute them?
I'll allow Soumen to answer this question.
Sanjesh, this is the CTS, the AWS CTS and also the wireline and the FTTH. As we, as Gopal mentioned, we are also bolstering with a lot of FTTH rollout happening, and we have actually increased our net adds on FTTH in this quarter. This is primarily towards CPEs, both wired as well as wireless FWA and the fiber rollout.
I thought fiber was in the wireless business, right?
The transport network,
There are two parts of fiber.
There is a common fiber backbone, and there is dedicated homes fiber.
That's the difference.
Clear. Clear.
Gopal, one last question, probably philosophically, on the capital allocation. India at 1.3 net debt to EBITDAL, Africa less than 1 times. I think balance sheet looks pretty strong and solid. How should we look at capital allocation? One, into the in-market M&A – number two, distribution to the shareholder; and number three, anything else you are looking beyond this?
have already mentioned that, you know, we will certainly look to step up dividend over the years. You've already seen that playing out right now. We continue to look at that. We are certainly going to see opportunities for, you know, in market growth in adjacencies. In some of the B2B areas that I've already talked about in data centers, you know, certainly those are areas that we will look at. Over and above that, I would say it's too premature because at this point in time our focus is to make sure that, you know, we identify opportunities around adjacencies so that we can really get some acceleration and the market there is very large and it's a real ocean as you know.
This is an area to step up our game on and we've had, you know, multiple sort of options but none of them have sort of fructified for various reasons. We are clear that, you know, we could see opportunities in making in-market acquisitions around adjacencies. That's pretty clear.
Thanks Gopal for answering all those questions, 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.
Thank you. Am I audible okay?
Yes.
My first question is an extension on what Sanjesh asked. Sorry. I am Vivekanand Subaraman from Ambit Capital. The capital allocation question, extending it to your portfolio. Gopal, if you can help us understand how investors should think about value unlocking. In your portfolio you have three listed subsidiaries, Airtel Africa, Hexacom , and Indus . There are some entities which will see IPOs in the next few years like payments and money. You also have private investors in extra. Now you are doing so much in xlify. From a portfolio perspective, how should one think about the Airtel in say 2028 or 2030 from a listed entities value unlocking perspective, that is question one. The second one is on tariff. You have spoken about tariff repair at length in the past and in this discussion also, my question is how much more repair is needed.
You have spoken in the past about tariff dispersion and India having very low tariff discussion and Airtel doing something about it. Can you please elaborate on these two aspects of tariff?
Thank you. I think the second one first, and I will comment briefly on the XLFI piece and so on, and then maybe I'll invite Harjeet to just take the other part on tariff. I mean, our view is that, like I mentioned before, whether you look at average revenue per user, you look at rate per GB, India is at the bottom on both the axis when compared to other markets all around the world, including markets that have a lower per capita income. The opportunity is clearly there. The second is that, as I've again mentioned in the past, the architecture of pricing in India is quite skewed where, at the entry level itself or just above the entry level, you get so much of data allowance, you get so much of calling and messaging that you really don't have any reason to upgrade.
If there was a more sensible architecture like you've got, for example, in Indonesia, then we would already be sitting at an ARPU that is substantially higher than where India is today without any pain to customers at the low end or without any pain to customers who can't afford to pay more. It's just that unfortunate situation where people who can afford to pay, the rich, are paying less and the poor are, you know, you don't need to charge support anymore. I think that's the real issue. On the tariff side, you're already aware of the three listed entities, Africa, Hexacom, and Indus . Yes, there are obligations to list the bank at some stage.
Nextdragon independent company Externify has been set up as a separate subsidiary, not with an intention to unlock value, but really with an intention to provide focus and provide credibility in the marketplace. The anchor customer for Externify is Airtel India. Now, increasingly, all of those tools and assets are being transferred to Airtel Africa. It really becomes two large companies operating across geographies. If we can take the same cloud now without spending a ton of money on development, but really putting modular CapEx, if we can take the same software without spending our money on development, but really then making margin on top of it in a business that is sticky, in a business that has licensing revenues, then I think this is a very powerful proposition which comes at very marginal cost. That's our thought process on Externify.
Who knows in the future where it will go, but as of now, because it's so locked in into Airtel, it will remain really within the Airtel support. Harjeet, do you want to comment on anything on the value unlock?
Yeah, sure. Thanks.
Gopal, I think you've covered the thematic pretty well, so maybe Vivekanand, I can give you the perspective around, you mentioned what is 3- 4 years out view on some of the subsidiaries that the company has. There are multiple pockets of some of the other nature of intervention, but I'll just focus on three pockets. Pocket number one is infrastructure domain. Pocket number two is really financial services, whether it is retail money as you mentioned or payments bank as Gopal was mentioning. Pocket number three is our standalone but minority stakes, whether it's Axiata in Bangladesh or Axiata's Dialog operations in Sri Lanka. In the infra space, data centers you commented right, there is a minority shareholder. We're not mandated to necessarily list, but that's the natural path to take forward. Our belief is that while the business has probably more than doubled in the.
Last three years, it's really still early.
It can scale up faster. Data center globally, you know better than us, commands over 20x CBA, EBITDA multiples. It is significant value, capability, and expertise well in place. We can continue to grow to CX growth on the top line and the EBITDAs in the next 2, 3 years and have possibly a listing of the data center entity over the coming years. No hurry, no mandate, no anxiety, very strong value, growing wealth.
Put it in place.
Possible monetization towers. It's already listed. The question to ask is should it remain listed? There's no anxiety over time it can be a trust or an equity or a combination. That is an intervention that should be done sometimes when markets have stabilized, maybe a few more years down the line. There's no necessity to either delist or continue to list. It's independent. We have flexibility to own more or own less depending upon how you want to manage the asset profile.
Third is fiber.
Again, some other players have done an InvIT structure. It is possible multiples of 100,000 km are available. We don't need to deconsolidate any debt. We don't need to do any deleveraging. This could be a disciplined way of running a large core infra vehicle. Is it necessary? Again, no.
Is it possible? Yes.
That's another three, four, five years out journey you may think that some of these things will come by. In financial services, Airtel Money has four private equity players including sovereigns QIA and Royal Family of Abu Dhabi. They own 20.22% of Airtel Money. In Africa, that is also a business that generates multiples of teams of EV/EBITDA. It's a billion dollar EBITDA business in Airtel Africa. We are keen to get it listed. It's a very strong mature platform but yet growing at over 30% per annum. That's Airtel Money's IPO is probably more visible in the future. Whether it's three, four, six, or nine, I don't know but it should happen. Airtel Payments Bank is under licensing guidelines from RBI and at least next two, three years we need to make sure.
It's listed the right thing to do.
There will be illumination of that which you will certainly see. Our stakes are a 28% stake in Bangladesh, 11% stake in Lanka which got merged into Dialog. I think suitable interventions will be done over time. We will of course need to monetize and create liquidity out of this. No hurry. It's not multiples of billions of dollars, but still very significant. These interventions you will see will generate more episodic liquidity, also illuminate value, and thirdly create path to exit to whosoever they need to. Our intent continues to be owning all of these businesses, but other stakes in South Asia.
Many thanks Gopal and Harjeet for the elaborate answers. A lot of food for thought. Thank you very much and all the best.
The next question comes from Mr. Aditya Suresh. Mr. Suresh, you may please unmute your side, introduce yourself, and ask your question now.
Hi, good afternoon, this is Suresh from Macquarie.
Gopal, I have a few questions for you on the partnership side, particularly
Perplexity, which I think is a really interesting partnership. Could you maybe comment about how the.
Economics would work for this partnership?
That's one. The second is on your Bajaj Finance partnership. Any kind of goal post milestones which you can kind of speak about and point to?
I think you know, on the first question, we are a very large platform in the country. Access to, you know, perhaps the best quality customers as reflected in our ARPU and therefore any company that is looking to get distribution, we are the first port of call. Suffice it to say that I can't disclose the economics, but it's really at a very, very marginal cost because this is really providing the distribution platform to Perplexity and we're very delighted with the partnership. The value that is being delivered to customers is very high, but the cost is marginal for us. On the overall finance side, yes, we have partnerships with Bajaj, we also have partnerships with other NBFCs. It's currently scaling up nicely.
We've lit up the EMI card across multiple channels which include our digital interfaces as also our stores and increasingly we will spread into other channels as well. For us the real focus is to make sure that we lend to the right person so that even the collection cost goes down and the delinquencies are low, which then proves the power of the platform. I think that's really what we're trying to do. It's scaling nicely. We're currently seeing in the month of July substantial growth of almost 15% over June and that's continuing to grow traction across.
For your B2B segment, there clearly seems to be far more emphasis on what's happening in that business compared to your previous earnings calls. Is that a fair call out to make? Is that like a strategic pivot or shift more towards B2B versus your B2C business?
Yeah, I think we. I wouldn't say there's greater focus towards the B2B business, but I would say there's greater action going on in the B2B business to retool the portfolio. You know, the mobile portfolio, the B2C portfolio is fairly solid because you've got mobile, you've got home broadband, you've got convergence. In B2B, you know, you're operating in very large unaddressed spaces. If we as a telcos remain in just connectivity and you know, CPaaS and maybe some sort of IOT, then we are missing the very large ocean that is growing very rapidly around the areas of cloud and security. By the way, they have very strong linkage with your existing, existing business and they also leverage very strong relationships that we already have with all of these enterprises.
This is something that is, you know, it like I'm putting disproportionate amount of my time in that side of the portfolio because there's a lot of retooling that is, that is happening as we speak. There are multiple, you know, not just the product work but also the go to market work where this portfolio needs to be retooled, capabilities need to be retooled and that's really what you're seeing. This is the reason we're talking a lot more about it, because the opportunity for growth is very high.
Are there any milestones which you can maybe point to or articulate the share of EBITDA for this business in the overall India portfolio? See, modest. It's about 10% thereabouts. If I take a three year.
Five year, I think one thing that I would say is that the contribution actually is a little higher than that because we don't disclose our postpaid B2B in that segment. We disclose it in B2C. Most cell phones around the world put that in B2B. Be that as it may, I agree with you that it's still modest. The opportunity is vast. I'm not going to put a revenue number, but I think in the immediate future I would love to see a roster of credible customers on our platform on cloud. I'd love to see that same roster coming through on some of the software beyond the two that I spoke about, which is Intel and Globe . We're having multiple conversations with at least 30- 40 telcos and there's a lot of interest.
If we can get some of that going, that would be a great milestone and then we can sit down and say where do we take this business over the next five years?
Thank you.
Thank you everyone. I would now remind the participants to stay connected on the call for the next session on Bharti Hexacom. I would now request Gopal to give his closing remarks for Bharti Airtel.
I just want to thank you very much for a lively Q& A. I look forward to seeing you again next quarter.
Thank you, Gopal. With this, now I'd like to hand over to Mr. Soumen Ray for his opening remarks on Bharti Hexacom performance.
Thank you. Good afternoon to everyone and welcome to the Bharti Hexacom Q1 FY 2026 earnings call. I have with me Akhil and Naval joining me on the call. We delivered another steady quarter with revenue of about INR 2,263 Crores. EBITDA, which is EBIT after leases for the quarter, came in at about INR 1,079 Crores with a margin of 47.7%, improving by about 110 bps. Sequentially, we added 17,000 mobile customers and about 54,000 homes. Customer stab for customer addition came in at about 283,000. ARPU for the quarter was INR 246, benefiting from the continued mix improvement and one day extra in the quarter. The homes and office business is seeing strong momentum with net adds holding on, which we expect to continue. Operating free cash generation, which is EBITDA minus CapEx, was a strong INR 854 Crores.
Balance sheet continues to remain robust with net debt excluding leases at about INR 2,806 Crores and our net debt to EBITDA is about 0.7x . Whilst ARPU, customers, and EBITDA margins have improved, there is a reduction in reported revenue due to drop in roaming revenue. Finally, I would want to call out two key areas where we continue to focus in our effort to deliver convenience and a brilliant experience to our quality customers. First, the extensive use of digital tools, which enable us to deliver safe and reliable connectivity with our industry-first anti-spam solution. This solution has already identified 2.5 billion spam calls since its launch. The second area that I would like to mention is the leverage of partnership, which was built by Airtel over the years, delivering extensive strength of digital and linear content and digital offerings.
In the most recent times, it is the partnership that Airtel stitched with Perplexity, which offers free AI capabilities for a year to all our customers at no extra cost. We continue to leverage the partnerships that Bharti Airtel , the parent company, has developed. With that, I'll hand over to Vaidehi to open the floor for questions.
Thank you, Soumen. With this, the first question comes from Sanjesh Jain. Mr. Jain, you may please unmute your side, introduce yourself, and ask your question now.
Good afternoon, thanks. Thanks for that opportunity. My first question on this drop in the roaming charges, is it more seasonality because second half is more tourist in Pakistan and has a lower tourist or is there beyond anything to look into this roaming charges drop?
Roaming charges, as I mentioned, as you mentioned, they're seasonal. Unfortunately, a couple of unfortunate incidents happened in Q1 and I was discussing with the CFO of a large travel aggregator and he also confided that travel did come down and picked up later as is evident from the numbers. Sanjish, this is like a pass through. Our EBITDA has not got impacted. I think there would be a bit of fluctuation, which is why when we did the IPO we also gave out the intrinsic ARPU. When I said that the ARPU is 246, that's the intrinsic ARPU excluding the roaming charges. Because in India, frankly, the customer doesn't pay for roaming. I would say yes, this is seasonal and it will keep going up or down t his time, I think it's a little larger than what we would have expected, but clearly offset through access charges, which means roaming revenue was impacted.
You mean there was a tension in the border, and hence it was more.
Elevated than the
The Airtel earnings call will not go there. Yes, there were concerns where people did not travel as much as they normally would.
That's very clear, Soumen. Second, on the cost line item, it appears to be very volatile. I can understand the access charges, but employee cost drop has been quite steep, and there is a significant sharp jump equally in SGNA cost. What explains this true line item?
Yeah, so the employee cost was some year-end provisions which was made in the last quarter and has got reversed. You know that we participate in one of the two circles that we have under the company under the Universal Service Obligation Fund, the USO Fund.
Correct.
When you set up a USO tower under that fund, you get certain benefits or certain subsidies for constructing the tower, and there are various stage gates which you need to cross before that subsidy gets cleared. Some of those were a little stuck, which was provided for. Fortunately, with the help of the department, we could clarify their points, and a lot of reversal crept into that number. Without getting into gory details, I know you see a very large, I think 7%-8% growth in OpEx. The underlying group growth is much lower. I would say in the range of about 2.5%-3%.
That's one last question, Soumen, before back to the queue. We have INR 2,800 Crores of debt, INR 800 Crores of quarterly cash flow we have been generating. We don't have debt beyond four quarters.
How should we look at the payout r atio, considering that we don't have much of an opportunity in the urgency, unlike pay terms. Should we go to a full payout anytime soon?
It would be improper for me to overtake the authority of the board. As you know, this year the dividend has been increased and there would be a directional increase in dividend. I must also tell you that the debt that we have, which is primarily because our external debt is very small, it is not even worth mentioning. It is primarily the deferred payment liabilities, which is through the department and the coupons that it carry. It is not very exciting to repay that. Yes, Bharti Hexacom at the position of cash that it has and it will continue to do, we may evaluate even some amount of prepaying of the debts. As far as the distribution or the allocation of capital is concerned, I must also call out to you.
While this company does not have a lot of investment into digital platforms and all, as time progresses we might like to increase our number of sites. We have leadership positions in both circles. There will be 5G deployment and so o n and so forth.
It is not completely out of the woods. There could be investments which would go in. Yes, directionally I agree with you. The company will have surplus funds and I think the board would take into account future liabilities and thereby decide the payout, which direction we should increase.
That's fair. Soumen, thanks. Thanks for answering all those questions and best of luck for the coming quarters.
Thank you, Sanjesh.
The next question comes from Mr. Aditya Suresh. Mr. Suresh, you may please unmute your side, introduce yourself, and ask your question now.
Hi, this is Aditya Suresh from Macquarie. I was surprised by the lack of questions on the Bharti call on ARPU so, maybe I'll ask here. Assuming there is no tariff impact, there's no tarrif increase from an industry perspective. I appreciate there are levers at play, whether it be from a mix perspective, more postpaid, more data, more international, etc. How much more do you think we can kind of expand ARPU with that in the absence of any headline industry-wide tariff increase?
First of all, I would answer this in two parts. The first part is unless a major tariff increase has happened, we have not seen consolidation or drop in customers. There is no major blockage of a marginal increase in tariff as we speak. We haven't seen it. The only time that there is some drop in our customer base is when headline direct increase happens. That tells us that affordability is there. The other thing that I would tell you, Aditya, is the way we look at ARPU is a derived number. The way the consumer looks at it is the value cost equation. If we can keep making.
It is new people adopting higher price points. We are not trying to get a postpaid customer who gives me INR 350 to go to INR 400. The way of doing this is to provide propositions to customers which will appeal to them at a higher cost. I'll give you a simple example. You have a one and a half GB pack and you are watching something and I tell you that you are at 90% of your daily data limit. Would you like to buy a top-up of 1 GB which is for today? Now as demographic income changes and affordability increases, the probability of you taking that 1 GB, maybe you will not need the whole 1 GB, maybe you will need only half a GB. The probability of you taking goes up at that moment of time.
You are not evaluating that I am paying INR 19 or INR 300 or my today's data is over. I want to watch this movie. I've spent 19 hours. If you look at it from this perspective, what will happen is more and more people, the more contextual I can make it, the more timing is appropriate for the next transaction. For that customer, the answer will keep going up because headline tariff, if it is not changing, what is changing is ancillary revenue attached to a mobile connection which is contextual to a customer. According to me, I cannot define that a person will not buy more than 3 GB, try more than 1 GB twice a month. In some month he might buy six times. He may not upgrade to the 2 GB pack because he says, I don't use 2 GB every day.
I'll remain at one and a half GB. I don't want to spend that fifty dollars. Technically I would say it will play out. This is how disposable income, demographic profile and our ability, which we have demonstrated over the last so many quarters, our ability to monetize them at the right contextual opportunity.
Thank you for sharing that perspective.
The next question comes from Mr. Vivekanand Subbaraman. Mr. Subbaraman, you may please unmute your side, introduce yourself, and ask your question now.
Hello. Thank you for the opportunity. I'm Vivekanand Subbaraman from Ambit Capital. I have two questions. The first one is on the FTTH versus FWA mix. Your homes and office business is growing at a very fast clip. You mentioned that you are increasing your catchment area for FTTH services, but in the markets you operate in, which are more rural than Airtel , does it make more sense for you to remain for a long time on FWA versus, say, Bharti Airtel , which operates in urban areas where FTTH might be more sensible? How much can this FWA market scale up? Is it more important for you? That is question one. The second question is what is so different about your customer profile that the data traffic or the mobile data usage is so much higher than the other industry players?
If you can help us understand some nuances of consumer behavior which perhaps seem to be playing out differently for you than the rest of the industry, that would be great. Thank you.
I'll take the second one first, and that's obvious. Vivekanand, the penetration of Wi-Fi eats into mobile data consumption. The rest of the country has more Wi-Fi penetration, or people go to work in places where they have a ccess to Wi-Fi where they do n ot need to use m obile data.
That is the single biggest reason why the data consumption per customer per month, which is about 29 GB, is higher than the blended average of any of the players, whether it is Airtel or o thers in the market who operate nationally.
That's the second answer. The first answer, you are directionally right, which is to say that FWA will have a possibly bigger share when the complete rollout. I mean let's say five years from n ow.
FWA will have a bigger share of total connected homes in these two markets as compared to the rest of the country because these are less urbanized. At the same time, we are also seeing a lot of development is happening in these markets. There are a couple of pockets which are a little disturbed, but otherwise there is a lot of development which is happening. New buildings are coming up, new residential settlements, shared services, offices, opportunities to work within the state. A lot of this is coming up. The terrain is difficult to pull fiber in both the two circles. To that extent, it is channel challenged. Directionally, I would like to believe that we will continue our fiberization.
If you are looking at the ultimate mix, as I say five years from now, yes, most likely wireless broadband through FWA will have a higher share of total broadband in these two circles than the rest of the country. That share will come down compared to today because we will be rolling out fiber in these two states as much as possible because there are a lot of TLP towns in both these two FLPs are also there so they may not feature in top 30. The other very interesting thing about NESA is that it's a very culturally evolved place and there is a lot of adoption of newer things, newer technologies, and if we can pull a long haul national long distance fiber to let's say Shillong, which we have, I'm sure we will be able.
It makes sense because the extraction of that fiber will be very, very good.
Great, Soumen, thanks for the detailed explanation. I have one small additional question bit on numbers. The last three years the lease costs or your infrastructure costs, which is basically the difference between the EBITDA and EBIT, that number has grown at 15% CAGR and almost INR 600 Crores, right? This is most likely the tower infrastructure cost plus loading charges. Now, this number I wanted to understand from a radio point of view. You said that you will keep rolling out more and perhaps your aspirations and requirements of this market also entail greater rural rollout. How should one think about these costs and overall your incremental cash EBITDAL margin? In FY 2025 it wasn't that great, but perhaps here on we can expect something better.
Thank you.
Yeah, I think you have approached it absolutely correctly. I think we were in a rollout phase. The only now additional cost which will come on a yearly basis between EBITDA and EBITDA, because the energy cost is subsumed in EBITDA. There are, with various power companies, a certain yearly increase which is agreed, which will seep in, and there would be more 5G radios which are put up compared to what it is today, and thereby there would be some loading payment that will go up. You are absolutely right. The gap, whatever additional had to happen, largely has happened now. It will be more gradual, and there will not be any major gap which will come going forward.
Okay, thank you so much for the elaborate answers to my questions.
Thank you.
The next question comes from Mr. Piyush Choudhary. Mr. Choudhary, you may please unmute your side, introduce yourself, and ask your question now.
Yeah.
Hi.
Hi Soumen. Thanks for the opportunity. Two questions. Firstly, you talked about possible site expansion and 5G expansion. Can you share the outlook for CapEx intensity for Bharti Hexacom for 2025, fiscal 2026 and beyond? Secondly
Airtel Black, like how is the a doption of Airtel Black in these circles? How has Labs grown and what are the tangible benefits you are seeing of the same?
Thanks
Piyush.
In line with what we have said earlier, CapEx will marginally unwind because our main rural acceleration program site rollout had happened earlier. Capex will directionally unwind, but you have to look at a year in full because there are a lot of issues primarily on account of monsoons and otherwise which hinders growth. At a yearly level it will marginally unwind. Coming to black attach, this current proposition with IPTV is seeing a lot of traction in these circles as well. We are looking at a very convenient solution where, first of all, the dish as it was called is no more required. There is no disruption because of weather, because one of the problems which a DTH service had was disruption due to cloudiness or rain. All of that is not there. The earlier black also meant you had two kinds of sources through which content came.
The OTTs came through the broadband whereas the linear content came through satellite. Now that has all been converged, so that helps the cause. We have had very, very promising results, nothing different from what we have seen in other parts of the country. Rajasthan, it took a little time to take off, but I think now it has taken off, and if I look at the last two weeks, three weeks numbers, I think it's catching up with the national level. It will trend in a similar way. As I mentioned again, the proposition is very good for two, three reasons, which is why the adoption has increased significantly.
Got it. Any kind of numbers that you can share in terms of what's the penetration or what's the subscriber?
You would have to excuse me on that one because it's not about giving numbers. It's also about then numbers can change a little bit because of various factors, then into explanation. We generally try to explain to people like you and others on the call about the generic direction in which the organization is going from a strategy and clarification on numbers. If something is a little weary, like we discussed the OpEx part.
Got it. Very clear. Thanks a lot.
Thank you.
The next question comes from Mr. Kunal Vora. Mr. Vora, you may please unmute your line, introduce yourself, and ask your question.
Yeah, thanks for the opportunity. A couple of questions I wanted t o check on digital services.
You're offering popular city, Google 100GB storage. These are all valuable services, especially for premium customers. What is the value which you look to derive? Is it a customer retention tool? Is it to gain customer insights? Or is there a plan to monetize by segmenting and offering these only to higher ARPU customers eventually? Can these partnerships be leveraged to drive ARPU?
Kunal, do you have a second question or this is the only one?
Second question is on Towers, if you can answer this one.
I'll take it later.
Okay, cool. Kunal. See, we've always said that we want to deal with quality customers and give them the best possible experience that they can. That is how our so-called mantra has been as to how we drive value in Hexacom . Now, why did we bring Perplexity? This is a tool which was lauded globally, and we felt if we bring it to our customers, our customers will feel that we are not just providing them a mobile service, we are also trying to make their life better by giving them an opportunity to experience some of these things. Whether it is Google cloud storage or, you know, having population. I'm sure till we had launched it, a large part of the customers in Rajasthan and Nesar would not have heard of Next City.
Similarly, I mean, people of course know about cloud, but I'm not sure even if you have an Android phone, you do not know how do you buy and how much, how do you move your phones other than the use. We felt that we should be at the leading edge of offering our customers the opportunity to experience some of these new age things. Now, what is in it for me? I don't make any money for sure. It's a third party IP, so even if I were to charge, I would just get a commission. This was not about trying to segment and give somebody anything from. It is about the fact that Bharti Hexacom as a company through the Airtel Mobility brand is trying to bring new experiences to its customer for them to try.
We have not said we'll give Perplexity free for the whole life. It's for a year, and people get a chance to experience and then they decide whether they want it or not, and they have got a good time of a year. Similarly, we have some extended tie-ups with some of the OTT players which is only exclusive to us. We try to bring them on board and give that experience to people. The whole idea is that other than pure mobile services or homes and office business, can we bring something extra to the customers which they see value, introduce them, and then they can evaluate whether they want to commercially continue it or not.
Understood.
Thank you. The second one is on tower additions. There seems to be a disconnect between Airtel 's commentary and that of Indus Towers, who seem to be largely done with the expansion, while Indus is still expecting strong tower additions. How do I reconcile this?
Okay, see the reconciliation is simple because Indus works with four, five organizations. We are one of them and possibly between us and another one, we are the smallest. I mean we have heard that Airtel still continues to do some rollouts. We have heard from media reports that there are some other players in the market who are also looking at rolling down. We, as a small, we will also do some, it won't be zero. I know this quarter some of you would have seen a number of a drop, that is nothing but relocation, timing, mismatch. Please ignore that, we are not reducing our number of towers. Indus has multiple sources. We are only one of them.
As far as Airtel India is concerned, I think it's improper to discuss this because the shareholders of Airtel India may or may not be on the call. Since you have raised the point, I'll tell you, Airtel India will look at which place they want to roll out based on economic reasons, customer acquisition reasons, customer experience reasons. It is not a spring of 10,000 towers across 22 circles. It's concentrated and prioritized. In that priority in Q1, Bharti Hexacom has evaluated it independently and realized we can live with this as of now.
Understood.
Okay, thank you.
That's it for me.
Thank you everyone. Now I would like Soumen to give his closing remarks on Bharti Hexacom.
Thanks a lot for joining in. It was a good quarter of margin expansion and steady cash generation. Look forward to speaking to all of you next quarter. Thank you.
Thank you everyone for joining the call today. Recording of this webinar will be available on the company website. Have a great day ahead.