BHARTIARTL — earnings call

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Prepared remarks

PRESENTATION · Vaidehi Sharma – Moderator

Vaidehi Sharma – Moderator Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen.

I am Vaidehi Sharma, the moderator for this webinar.

Welcome to the Bharti Airtel Limited’s second quarter ended September 30, 2023 Earnings Webinar.

Present with us today is the senior leadership team of Bharti Airtel Limited.

I must remind you that the overview and discussions today may include certain forward-looking statements that must be viewed in conjunction with the risks that we face.

Post the management opening remarks, we will open up for an interactive Q&A session.

Interested participants may click on “Raise Hand Option” on zoom application to join the Q&A queue.

The participants may click this option during the management opening remarks itself to ensure that they find a place in the queue.

Upon announcement of name, participants to kindly click on “Unmute Myself” in the pop up on screen and start asking the question post introduction.

With this, I would now like to hand over to Mr. Gopal Vittal for the opening remarks.

Gopal Vittal — Managing Director & Chief Executive Officer, Bharti Airtel Limited Thank you Vaidehi, good afternoon and welcome everybody to this earnings call for quarter two FY2024. With me on the call is Soumen, our CFO, Harjeet Kohli and Naval.

Let me start by giving you a quick update on our business, but let me start with the ESG.

During the quarter, we received the Golden Peacock Award for sustainability for the year 2023, and just to spell out a few initiatives that we have undertaken towards our ESG agenda.

On diversity, we had a target to achieve at least 20% women participation in our workforce by 2025 as compared to 11% in FY2023. This is tracking very well through structural changes brought in along with introduction of differentiated employment models, focused on balanced slate hiring, and bespoke four programs to grow our women talent.

On environment, we have taken significant steps at each level of our business towards environment friendly procurement.

From the next quarter, for example, most of our SIM cards will be sourced from recycled plastic materials.

DTH boxes will also come with compostable packaging material.

Before I go any further and talk about our business, I just want to lay out our experience on 5G.

Airtel took a very bold position to go with NSA and as I explained a year ago, the power of this strategy which was predicated and I mentioned this, I think about six quarters ago, was predicated on better coverage, better experience, lower power and lower capex.

This has been proven in the marketplace.

As a company, we have invested very smartly and designed our network based on very sound network engineering, resulting in incredible coverage over 5000 cities and about 20000 villages.

We are now delivering decisively the best experience for customers on 5G.

In fact, open signal results have awarded almost all the category awards to Airtel.

So whether it is video streaming experience on 5G as well as overall, live video experience on 5G as well as overall, gaming experience on 5G as well as overall, voice experience on 5G as well again as overall, or upload quality, Airtel is a standout winner.

Specifically, on 5G experience, of the six awards, we are number one for five.

This is why Airtel has been consistently gaining on quality customers, continues to have the highest ARPU in the industry, and the highest active users in the industry.

There have been some reports that one of the players in the industry has seen higher share of more than Rs.20000 phones on their network.

I would like to point out that given the reset in prices of entry-level smartphones, this is indeed an industry wide trend in the last 18 months.

So, if overall price of smartphones have gone up with this growth of more than 20000 smartphones generally in the marketplace the share of more than Rs.

20000 smartphones has increased on all networks.

The real number to look is the relative market share growth of high end phones on 3P platforms, which is a third party platforms, which is platforms there are other OTT platforms, and from our understanding Airtel in the last 12 months has added close to 100 basis points of market share of high end Final Transcript