Q1 FY23 -Another solid quarter for Bharti Airtel

Bharti Airtel Limited announces its audited consolidated Ind AS results for the first quarter ended June 30, 2022.

Q1’23 Performance:
The consolidated revenues for Q1’23 at Rs 32,805 crore grew 22.2% YoY. Consolidated mobile data traffic at 12,288 PBs in the quarter with a healthy YoY growth of 17.7%.

India revenues for Q1’23 at Rs 23,319 crore, increased by 23.8% YoY. Mobile revenues grew by 27.4% YoY on account of increase in ARPU and strong 4G customer additions during the year. ARPU for the quarter came in at Rs 183 as compared to Rs 146 in Q1’22. This is an outcome of company’s focus on acquiring and retaining quality customers and a relentless obsession with customer experience.

We continue to garner strong share of the 4G customers in the market and added 20.8 Mn 4G customers to its network over last year, an increase of 11.3% YoY. ARPU continues to be the best in industry, average data usage per mobile data customer at 19.5 GBs/month and voice usage per customer at 1,104 mins /month.

We rolled out additional ~8k towers in the quarter to optimally augment our coverage and provide differentiated network experience. Several initiatives have also been undertaken to improve Network quality – leveraging digital tools/probes to monitor and improve customer experience and scaling up Vo-Wi-Fi adoption to improve indoor experience. We now have ~44 Mn customers using our Vo-Wi-Fi services.

With the conclusion of currently held 5G auction, we now have the widest mobile broadband footprint across the country making us well-positioned to usher in the 5G revolution in India. We acquired 19,867.8 MHz spectrum by securing a pan India footprint of 3.5 GHz, 26 GHz bands and selectively bolstering low & mid-band spectrum. This massive spectrum bank was secured for a total consideration of Rs 43,040 cr. The acquisition of this vast amount of spectrum strapped on to an already industry best existing pool of spectrum will mean that we would not need to spend any material sum on spectrum for many years to come. Specifically on 700 MHz band, we have enough mid band spectrum to cater to 5G roll out and hence have been judicious on acquiring very high cost sub-GHz spectrum. Our long term spectrum acquisition strategy has ensured that we are able to offer the best in class 5G experience at the lowest cost of ownership with the most power efficient solution.

Homes business segment continues to tap the robust growth opportunity in the digital landscape which helped in boosting the revenue by 41.9% YoY. We have added ~ 1.4 Mn customers YoY to reach to a total base of 4.79 Mn. We continue to expand our on-ground presence significantly through the innovative asset light local cable operator partnership model; we are now live in 983 cities leveraging this model. We have launched high speed broadband services in Ladakh and Andaman and Nicobar Islands, becoming the first private operator to offer service in these remote regions

Airtel Business continues to accelerate its momentum with 15.2% YoY growth driven by our razor-sharp strategy of both going wide to penetrate more accounts as well as going deep to serve our largest customers with our full set of products and solutions. The focus on fast growing emerging products including security, CPaaS and data centres continues to yield results.

Digital TV continues to amass its strong market position with 17.4 Mn customer base at the end of quarter. We continue to make progress through innovative propositions and differential converged experience.

The steady evolution of our digital ecosystem has started to reap incremental value creation with increased customer engagement and improving stickiness across both the Consumer and Enterprise segment. We have robust customer base of over 185 Mn across our key digital assets – Thanks, Xstream and Wynk. Airtel Xstream has achieved 2 million paid subscriber milestone and is now India’s fastest growing OTT aggregator platform. Airtel continues to bring innovations for enhancing customer experience by launching India’s first multiplex in the Metaverse. Our B2B Digital offerings including cloud communication & adtech platforms continues to gain strong momentum with new customer on boarding.

There are over 1.2 million retailers transacting and making payments every day on Mitra App. During the quarter, Airtel Payments Bank continues to expand rapidly with a strong total customer base of 139 Mn and highly engaged Monthly Transacting Users (MTU) base of over 44 Mn.

Consolidated EBITDA witnessed an increase of 25.9% YoY to Rs 16,604 crore in Q1’23. This led to an improvement in EBITDA margin from 49.1% in Q1’22 to 50.6% in Q1’23 exhibiting our continued focus on operational efficiencies. EBITDA margins across businesses remained healthy, with India mobile services EBITDA improving from 49.2% in Q1’22 to 51.2% in Q1’23.

Consolidated EBIT increased by 43.7% YoY to Rs 7,813 crore. The Consolidated Net Income before exceptional items for the quarter stands at Rs 1,517 crore. The Consolidated Net income after exceptional items for the quarter stands at Rs 1,607 crore.

The Net Debt-EBITDA ratio (annualized) and including the impact of leases as on June 30, 2022 is at 2.52 times as compared to 3.03 times as on June 30, 2021. 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 and CEO, said:

“This has been another solid quarter. We continue to deliver strong and sustained growth at 4.5% sequentially. EBITDA margins are now at 50.6%. Our enterprise and homes business has strong momentum and delivered strong double digit growth, improving the diversity of the overall portfolio. Airtel’s strategy of winning with quality customers continues to yield good results with an industry beating ARPU at Rs 183.

As India gets ready to launch 5G, we are well positioned to raise the bar on innovation. We are also confident of meeting the emerging needs of discerning customers looking for speed, coverage and latency. Our astute spectrum strategy over the last few years as we bolstered mid band spectrum is designed to deliver the best experience at the lowest total cost of ownership.”

Customer Base                                                          (Figures in nos, except ratios)

CT Bureau