Bharti Airtel has announced its Q2 FY25 results. The highlight of the results is the telco’s ARPU (average revenue per user) figure, which stood at Rs 233, a figure close to the company’s short-term goal of Rs 250. Before we dive into the numbers, it’s imperative that we talk about the big management changes that have taken place in the company. Bharti Airtel has just announced that Gopal Vittal, MD and CEO, will be promoted to the role of Executive Vice Chairman of Bharti Airtel Ltd, and his role will be taken up by Shashwat Sharma, currently serving as the Chief Operation Officer (COO) of Bharti Airtel. Along with this, Gopal Vittal will also be appointed to the board of Airtel Africa Plc to provide strategic guidance.
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Rakesh Bharti Mittal, after serving Airtel for nine years will move on to the board of Indus Towers and Bharti Hexacom Limited. Now let’s shift our focus back on the quarterly results.
Bharti Airtel said that its quarterly revenues stood at Rs 41,473 crore, up 12% YoY and 7.7% QoQ. Out of this, India’s business contributed with a quarterly revenue of Rs 31,561 crore, up 16.9% YoY. Mobile services revenue jumped 18.5% YoY during the quarter as the telco hiked the tariffs in July. The effect of that also came on the ARPU, which jumped to Rs 233 from Rs 211 in the previous quarter. The full effect of the hike usually comes in two to three quarters, and thus, a jump in ARPU will be noticeable even during the coming quarters.
Airtel’sconsilidated net income for the quarter after exceptional items stood at Rs 3,593 crore. The telco said that its smartphone data customers went up by 26.2 million YoY and 4.2 million QoQ, which was 75% of its overall mobile business. Airtel added 0.8 million postpaid users during the quarter which took the telco’s postpaid base to 24.7 million, and mobile data consumption was up 22.6% YoY, standing at 23.9GB per month.
The homes business also saw the customer base growing by 583k users in Q2 FY25. The growth in homes business was attributed to the accelerated FWA expansion, said Airtel. The homes business now stands at a total customer base of 8.6 million.
The capex for the quarter stood at Rs 6,260 crore, and the entire customer base at 407 million. Airtel Digital TV saw its revenues going up by 1% YoY, to Rs 759 crore and the customer base stood at 15.8 million.
“We rolled out additional ~5k towers and ~15.2k mobile broadband stations in the quarter to enhance connectivity and provide superior network experience. Our commitment towards providing unparalleled network experience is reflected in our investments as we added ~34k towers YoY,” said Airtel in a release.
Gopal Vittal, MD and CEO, Bharti Airtel, said, “We delivered another quarter of solid performance, with India revenue growing 8.7% sequentially. Africa maintained strong revenue growth momentum as well with 7.7% constant currency growth. The flow thru of tariff repair is in-line with our expectation on ARPU increase and SIM consolidation. We reported industry leading ARPU of Rs 233. Our focus on winning quality customers and driving premiumization has helped us add 4.2 Mn smartphone customers. We continue to expand our Wifi coverage with FWA offerings to over 2,000 cities. We continue to invest in our digital businesses to diversify portfolio strength and drive long term growth. Airtel also continues to invest in a future ready digital network to deliver brilliant customer experience – we launched India’s first AI-powered, network-based spam detection solution to solve the endemic problem of spam calls and messages. Our 5G network has once again received validation from Open signal – Airtel was awarded all the five awards on 5G network experience.
Our balance sheet remains solid, supported by cash generation and continued deleveraging. During the quarter, we prepaid another tranche of Rs 8,465 crore of high cost spectrum dues.
At the same time, we believe that industry needs further tariff repair for sustained investments given that ROCE for India is still only 11 percent.”
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