Bharti Airtel May Start Fresh Capex Cycle Soon: JP Morgan

Bharti Airtel, India’s second-largest telecom operator, may start a fresh capex (capital expenditure) cycle soon. The telco had started moderating the capex after hitting the peak in Q1 FY24. The reason was that there was no need to go aggressive with 5G rollout any further as the device ecosystem was still evolving. But now, there are more things that just 5G on the horizon for the company. There’s the homes business, as well as the data center business which needs a higher capex spend from the telco to keep up its edge in the market.

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According to JP Morgan, Airtel may start a fresh capex cycle from fiscal year 2027. This may impact the telco’s free cash flow (FCF) generation which has allowed it to deleverage pretty fast in the recent past. Due to moderating the capex, Airtel’s FCF had boosted, and this made it a great purchase for the market.

“This has made Airtel a stock market darling and the best performing megacap (>$100 billion market cap) year-to-date. However, ambitions to accelerate broadband growth in a land-grab, build a 1GW data centre, and early signs of 5G capacity constraints suggest sharp risks to this assumption,” JP Morgan said in a note.

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Airtel’s pace of adding new Homes customers has sped up. It was about 1 million during the September 2025 quarter. There’s still plenty of upside for the company to add new users by scaling the capex up. However, this may again hurt the FCF generation but will allow potential monetisation in the future.