Bharti Airtel executive vice chairman Gopal Vittal, during the company’s earnings call for the fourth quarter of FY26, said the company will strongly focus on investing in data centres, strengthening the optical fibre cable network and scaling up recently announced non-banking financial services, in which the company has announced Rs 20,000 crore investment.
“Our fibre points of presence need to increase a lot more; the quality of infrastructure needs to be put in place. There is a big project that is underway, which we spoke about last time on resilience. Just the resilience of our Edge data centres, and we are focused right now on building in the next 18 to 24 months – 56 world-class edge data centres, which will really stand us in very good stead over the next 2 to 3 decades and build a strong point of differentiation,” he said.
Vittal said that Airtel has only about 10-12 per cent share of the Indian market, which is not enough for the company given its size and scale.
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“We are not satisfied with that kind of presence, so we really need to step up our game in data centres, and our ambition is to get to a gigawatt as we mentioned in a few years’ time. That game will not end there. We will continue to build out. You know the data centre market has 50 to 60 per cent of its demand coming out of Mumbai. So, land will need to be acquired, and data centres will need to be built,” he said.
Bharti Airtel’s total capex in the March 2026 quarter increased by 11.5 per cent to Rs 16,066 crore, including Rs 13,488 crore spent in India from Rs 14,400 crore on a year-on-year basis. For the full fiscal year 2026, the capex declined by about 3 per cent to Rs 47,522 crore from Rs 48,927 crore.”The first and primary port of call for any capital allocation will be our core business. I think we have no right to play in any adjacency unless our core is vibrant. So, within the core radio capex, as I have mentioned before, it is moderating. In Africa, it is growing, but in India, it is moderating. Transport capex, we are going to double down and actually do more. We have been doing this systematically for the last 4 years,” Vittal said.
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He said the home business, fixed broadband services segment, will be another big area of focus for the company.
“The real challenge here in homes is to step up our penetration and really grab as much share of homes because in the long term that will be a very significant mode for the company. This is very high…this is a business that you return that is very profitable over a period of time because the churn and the customer lifetime value of a home tends to be very low,” Vittal said.
Talking about average revenue per user and plans for a hike in service rates, he said that the price architecture in India is broken, where the rich are paying less than they ought to, and the poor are perhaps paying as much as they need to.
“This, I think, needs to change,” Vittal said.
Bharti Airtel has posted a 33.5 per cent decline in consolidated net profit to Rs 7,325 crore for the March 2026 quarter, mainly due to one-time provisions related to statutory and tax liabilities.
The company’s annual revenue for the first time crossed Rs 2 lakh crore, driven by 3.2 per cent customer growth to 66.5 crore, coupled with an increase in average revenue per user (ARPU) in India.
Airtel’s mobile services segment in India contributed Rs 28,831 crore to the total revenue with a growth of about 8 per cent during the reported quarter. The growth was driven by an increase in customer base, along with about 5 per cent growth in average revenue per user (ARPU) of Rs 257 from Rs 245.
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