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 third quarter ended December 31, 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 also click on 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 screen and start asking questions post introduction.

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

Gopal Vittal — Managing Director & Chief Executive Officer, Bharti Airtel Limited Thank you and very warm welcome to the earnings call for quarter three FY2024. With me on the call, I have got Soumen, Harjeet, and Naval.

Let me briefly start with a telecom bill for 2023.

It was a forward-looking and progressive bill as I have mentioned before and it was really in continuation of the reforms that was announced by the government in September 2021.

The highlights of the bill are that it simplifies the currently complex system which includes various types of licensing into a more cohesive and efficient authorization based regime.

It also ensures predictability and availability of spectrum covering aspects such as refarming, harmonization, trading, leasing and sharing.

A very welcome move is graded and proportionate penalty regime which will bring in ease of doing business and compliance while increasing the enforcement rate.

The RoW reforms seeks to streamline approvals across the country however there still are challenges in some states as regards with RoW.

A quick update on ESG and let me start with our smaller business which is a large power guzzling business which is data centres.

We are taking a number of initiatives in Nxtra.

First on the environment, Nxtra has adopted the 3R approach of reduce, reuse, and recycle to minimize waste across all their centres and attain a 100% landfill diversion rate in the next two years.

All newly constructed data centres will be LEED certified either platinum or gold or an equivalent certification.

Nxtra is the first data centre operator in India to install solid oxide fuel cell based captive power plants and to deploy fuel cell technology.

A new campus in Mumbai is designed for zero discharge.

Over the past five years, Nxtra has seen a remarkable 20% improvement in power usage effectiveness with a further target to reduce 10% by 2025.

Airtel as a whole we have seen the number of women employees grow one and a half times as compared to last year.

Another notable feature is the fact that 84% of all our site infrastructure managers at edge sites are ex-servicemen.

On governance, we take great pride in our disclosures, in our transparency and our code of ethics.

Let me turn to our financial performance.

Overall, we have delivered a satisfactory performance.

Consolidated revenue of about 37,900 crores was impacted by currency devaluation in Africa, particularly the Naira and Malawian Kwacha.

India continues to grow steadily by 3% sequentially delivering over 27,800 crores.

EBITDA margins came in at 53.9%.

Mobile and homes delivered consistent growth while Airtel Business saw moderation on account of the slowdown in the global business, this I mentioned already in the last quarter.

We remain on course with our strategy to focus on quality customers deliver for them a brilliant experience, put digital at the core of all we do and strip out waste.

The company generated operating free cash flows of just under 7250 crores for India despite a front loaded capex.

Capex for the quarter was 7750 crores and as I have mentioned our investments are focused on 5G, rural expansion, fiber deployment, and data centres.

Given our strong cash generation, net debt to EBITDA for India continues to improve every quarter and now stands at 2.91 versus 3.08 in Q2. We paid another tranche of 8325 crores of high cost DoT debt.

In this fiscal we prepaid over 16349 crores of high cost DoT debt.

Final Transcript