Airtel CEO said, the 5G ecosystem is yet to develop in India and the prices are very high. Telecom companies including Vodafone Idea (VI) and Reliance Jio have also said that the current prices are exorbitant.
Six consecutive profitable quarters after an equal number of losses - for Bharti Airtel, the turnaround has been quick. But it is not a result of higher tariffs or absence of exceptional items alone. Execution and strategy are playing a part, too. Bharti Airtel's chief executive officer Gopal Vittal summed it up in a post-result conference call last month. "We track the profit in each of our 237,500 (cell) sites.
According to rating agency Fitch, India can in the long run support five-six profitable telecom operators.
Bharti Airtel on Thursday announced the commercial launch of 4G services in 296 towns across India after testing the market in select cities.
Mittal's total remuneration dipped marginally by 2.52 per cent.
Airtel said it will implement 25 per cent more stringent mobile call drop benchmark of 1.5 per cent versus 2 per cent prescribed by the regulator Trai.
27 large listed firms give double-digit hikes to top executives despite a decline in net profit.
Bharti Enterprises Group CFO Sarvjit S Dhillon said there is more clarity on the regulatory front now, which is a good sign for the industry.
Consolidated EBITDA came in at Rs 8,265 crore.
Consolidated net debt of Airtel increased by 24 per cent to Rs 97,395.2 crore.
Airtel reported a 19 per cent rise in its ARPU in the March quarter, as it removed the non-paying users from its network.
A grouping of Indian and Indian-origin professionals working with tech giants like Google, Uber, Amazon and Facebook have written an open letter against the new religion-based citizenship law and the planned national register of citizens, terming them as "fascist". The letter by 'TechAgainstFascism' on online publishing platform Medium also urged the leaders to refuse to shut off the Internet at the "government's whim" and to ensure that content moderation is not skewing pro-government.
India's second-largest telecom firm Bharti Airtel on Tuesday reported a net profit of Rs 1,134 crore for the September 2021 quarter, and said it is witnessing strong business momentum with growth in 4G customers and increase in mobile ARPU. This is against a loss (attributable to owners of the parent) of 763.2 crore during the year-ago quarter, the company said in a statement. Its consolidated revenues for the second quarter of FY21 stood at Rs 28,326.4 crore, up 18.8 per cent year-on-year (on a comparable basis) and 13 per cent y-o-y on a reported basis, it added.
Telecom operator Bharti Airtel Chairman Sunil Mittal on Wednesday said the telecom sector reforms approved by the Cabinet will ensure that the industry is able to invest fearlessly, and the company will respond to Prime Minister Narendra Modi's call to invest and accelerate the country's growth. Among a series of breathers for the stressed telecom sector, the Cabinet has approved the inclusion of revenues earned only from telecom services in the adjusted gross revenue (AGR), and the removal of penalty on dues to be paid to the government prospectively. Mittal congratulated and thanked the government for undertaking these seminal reforms to lift an industry that is at the core of his Digital India vision.
The board of Bharti Airtel approved the rights issue to raise up to Rs 25,000 crore through the issuance of fully paid up shares at a price of Rs 220 per share and to raise an additional Rs 7,000 crore via the foreign currency perpetual bond issue.
With this acquisition, Airtel will be second company, after Reliance Jio, in the country to have pan-India presence in 2300 Mhz band
It is learnt that the defence ministry is refusing to let go of its 100 MHz spectrum, which was allotted earlier. In that case, the department of telecommunications (DoT) will be left with only 175 MW of 5G spectrum of the total 300 MHz.
The process of switching off the 3G network has already started with Kolkata in the recent-concluded June quarter. By September, the shutdown will be affected in 6-7 more circles and between December and March the entire 3G network would be shut down.
The launch of services by Jio in September 2016 had disrupted the whole telecom sector, with operators matching low rates to maintain competitive edge
As the new owner, Airtel will take over Telenor India's spectrum, licences and operations, including its employees and customer base of 44 million.
Kotak Mahindra Bank to have a 19.9% stake in the proposed banking venture.
Vodafone Idea and Airtel have made provisions for their liabilities arising from the Supreme Court order in their latest September quarter results.
It came as a surprise to all stakeholders - competing telecom companies (telcos), most analysts and even the government's internal projections on revenues from the 5G auctions. Reliance Jio disrupted all calculations by paying a stiff Rs 40,000 crore to buy 10 MHz of spectrum in the 700-MHz band, globally considered a key band for efficient 5G service coverage, along with the default 3.5 GHz band and the ultra-high speed and low-latency millimetre band of 26 GHz band. So what made Jio pay almost 45 per cent of its total spend in this auction for the 700 MHz band - much more than what it rustled up even for the 3.5 GHz band?
About 2,000 MHz will be put up for auction in bands such as 700 MHz, 800 MHz, 900 MHz, 1,800 MHz, 2,100 MHz, 2,300 MHz and 2,500 MHz
The Indian market is more in sync with mobile markets of advanced countries like the UK, Japan, and South Korea, where there are fewer players - three to four.
Every service provider, say analysts, now needs to make a much larger investment, and therefore needs a much larger share of the market to be profitable.
Telecom major Bharti Airtel on Wednesday reported over two-fold jump in consolidated net profit at Rs 1,436.5 crore in the third quarter of 2014-15 on the back of continued growth in mobile data revenue.
Bharti Airtel's total revenue for the December 2018 quarter stood at Rs 20,519 crore, just one per cent higher than the Rs 20,319 crore in the corresponding period of the previous year.
The uniform SUC, if implemented as per recommendations made by Telecom Regulatory Authority of India, will provide relief for mobile operators such as Airtel, Vodafone and Idea, but will increase rates for broadband wireless access spectrum holders like RJIL.
Average data usage on Airtel India network grew about three fold to 2611 megabyte (about 2.5 GB) per customer from 904 MB on YoY basis. But the average revenue from the data services per customer declined by 22.7 per cent during the period.
Indian telecom seems to be getting back on its feet.
Given the escalating cost of doing business, the revenue opportunity is decreasing and consolidation is an inevitable part of the industry.
Seeking urgent steps by mobile operators to check call drops, regulator TRAI on Wednesday said their performance would be reviewed after 15 days and warned it will "cross the bridge" if they fail to do the needful.
A year after Bharti Airtel launched 4G services, there are only 6.5 mn users in the country
Bharti to spend Rs 1,600 cr for spectrum payout over 10 yrs; Telenor to service its own debt.
In effect, companies which put their money in telecom in India would have done much better to keep the cash in bank and earn interest.
'If you look at voice and data realisations in India, they are the lowest in the world.'
Despite low tariffs, voice usage is not growing.
After initial success, data use is stagnating and getting consumers to spend additional money for high-speed internet is proving to be difficult for telcos.
But, unlike its competitors, it did not have a comprehensive infrastructure back-end and required fresh investments.
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