Bharti Airtel Limited-Q3 FY23 highlights

Bharti Airtel Limited announced its audited consolidated results for the third quarter ended December 31, 2022.

Q3’23 Performance:

The consolidated revenues for Q3’23 at Rs 35,804 crore grew 19.9% YoY. Consolidated mobile data traffic at 13,625 PBs in the quarter with a healthy YoY growth of 23.7%.

India revenues for Q3’23 at Rs 24,962 crore, increased by 19.4% YoY. Mobile revenues grew by 20.8% YoY on account of improved realisation as well as strong 4G customer additions during the year. ARPU for the quarter stood at Rs 193 as compared to Rs 163 in Q3’22 on the back of our continued focus on quality customers and premiumization.

In order to make staying connected easy, intuitive and compelling, Airtel has launched ‘Airtel World Pass’. The World Pass will revolutionize the experience for all international travel because one pack works seamlessly across 184 countries that will cover layover at an airport or travelling to two or more countries.

We strengthened our leadership position in Postpaid segment with a customer base of 32.5 Mn (including IoT). We continue to garner strong share of the 4G customers in the market and added 21.2 Mn 4G data customers to our network over last year, an increase of 10.8% YoY. ARPU continues to be the best in industry and average data usage per data customer at 20.3GBs/month.

We rolled out additional ~8.6k towers in the quarter to further strengthen our network coverage and provide ubiquitous connectivity.

Several initiatives have also been undertaken to improve Network quality – leveraging digital tools/probes to monitor and improve customer experience.

Homes business segment continues its strong momentum and delivers a revenue growth of 29.8% YoY, an outcome of continued acceleration on the back of growing need for reliable and consistent broadband in India. We added 432 K customers during the quarter to reach to a total base of 5.6 Mn. We continue to accelerate our rollouts on the back of innovative asset light local cable operator spartnership model, we are now live in 1140 cities through this model.

Airtel Business continues to strengthen its numero uno position with 16.4% YoY revenue growth by leveraging the converged portfolio of Airtel and harvesting the rapidly increasing demand for data and connectivity related solutions. Our strategy of going both wide to penetrate more accounts as well as deep has led to continuous outperformance and market share expansion. Our emerging digital products are also yielding results and enabling businesses to create a nimble, scalable, and omni-channel engagement for their customer.

Digital TV business has added 214k customers – highest in last 8 quarters in a challenging industry. This is a result of Company’s strategy of simplified pricing and differentiated converged experience to win high value customers. Focus on high value channels and quality acquisitions has yielded customer gains leading to an overall base at 16 Mn at the end of the quarter.

We have been scaling our digital capabilities to deliver best-in-class experience and offering differentiated digital services to our customers. We have robust customer base of ~200 Mn MAUs across our key digital assets – Thanks, Xstream and Wynk. In our continuous endeavour to deliver additional value proposition to our customers through innovation, Wynk Music, India’s number 1 music streaming app by downloads and daily active, users introduced Wynk Rewind, a personalized user experience which features top artists, albums, songs, playlists, heard by the listeners during the year.

There are ~1.2 million retailers transacting and making payments every day on Mitra App.

Consolidated EBITDA witnessed an increase of 24.8% YoY to Rs 18,601 crore in Q3’23. This led to an improvement in EBITDA margin from 49.9% in Q3’22 to 52.0% in Q3’23 as we continue to focus on our War on Waste program to help fuel margin improvements. EBITDA margins across businesses remained healthy, with India mobile services EBITDA improving from 49.3% in Q3’22 to 53.8% in Q3’23.

Consolidated EBIT increased by 45.9% YoY to Rs 9,260 crore. The Consolidated Net Income before exceptional items for the quarter stands at Rs 1,994 crore. The Consolidated Net income after exceptional items grew by 91.5% YoY to Rs 1,588 crore.

The Net Debt-EBITDA ratio (annualized) and including the impact of leases as on December 31, 2022 is at 2.82 times. We continue to optimize the capital structure by judiciously allocating capital across our business to strengthen the balance sheet.

In a statement, Gopal Vittal, MD, said:

“We have delivered another quarter of consistent and competitive growth across all our businesses. Revenue grew sequentially by 3.7%, while EBITDA margin expanded to 52.0%. Our strategy of winning quality customers has helped us add 6.4 Mn 4G customers and exit the quarter with an industry leading ARPU of Rs 193. Postpaid, Enterprise, Homes as well as our Africa business sustained their momentum while the DTH business showed signs of growth in an industry that continues to be under pressure. Our overall performance is testimony to the breadth and diversity of our portfolio that spans across both geographies as well as businesses. Our 5G rollout is on track to cover all towns and key rural areas by March 2024.”

CT Bureau