Bharti Airtel News

Africa as in India. It is the second-biggest telecom company in the continent after South Africa's MTN. Fourteen years ago, Bharti Airtel chairman Sunil Mittal took the brave decision to go to Africa and it has been a perilous journey for his company. Africa, where Mittal had expected to map India's telecom growth story onto the continent, turned out to be little like India with its sparse population as well as political volatility which would discourage any pioneer telecom company. Now that Airtel Africa seems to be out of the woods, and having acquired an elephantine footprint in 14 countries across the continent, a big challenge might be shaping up. Mukesh Ambani, the chairman of Reliance Industries (RIL), who disrupted India's telecom market with low tariffs and cheap handsets by launching Reliance Jio in 2015 and swept aside Airtel to become the market leader, is acquiring a tiny foothold in the African telecom market as a telecom tech and equipment vendor. Also Read: RIL's Mukesh Ambani set for African safari with 5G tech solutions

Bharti Airtel managing director Gopal Vittal said rival Vodafone Idea’s recent Rs 18,000 crore capital raise will increase competition but is good for India’s telecom sector, which requires three strong players. He added that the telecom industry urgently needs substantial tariff repair, ideally via multiple rounds of price hikes to boost average revenue per user (ARPU) to the Rs 300 level as the current returns are way too low. Vittal did not specifically comment on when Airtel would start charging a premium for its 5G services, but conceded that the current high levels of data consumption — in the present 5G at 4G rates scenario — would automatically decline once 5G services are priced in. Airtel’s 5G user base was at 72 million in the quarter ended March 2024, and the telco is adding around 2-2.5 million 5G users a month amid rising device shipments, he added.

Telecom major Bharti Airtel on Tuesday reported a 31% fall in its consolidated net profit at Rs 2,072 crore for the quarter ended March 2024. This compares with Rs 3,006 crore profit in the previous year's quarter. The profit missed the Street estimates by a wide margin, which saw the figure around Rs 3,274 crore.

FPIs) pumped $991 million in April, a Mint analysis showed, betting on the revival of Vodafone Idea Ltd, expected tariff hikes and rising phone usage. FPIs jostled for shares in Vodafone Idea's ₹18,000 crore follow-on public offering (FPO), India's largest, also sparking interest in tower company Indus Towers, which stands to gain from the telco's planned rollout of 4G and 5G networks. Bharti Airtel picked up as well, as investors eye long-awaited tariff hikes later this year.

Bharti Airtel, Goldman Sachs has a neutral rating in Tata Consumer and Investec maintained a buy on Cipla. We have collated a list of recommendations from top brokerage firms from ETNow and other sources:

content consumption and on-demand viewing getting more prevalent, say industry executives. Having lost customers to over-the-top (OTT) platforms, traditional TV distribution platforms are looking at bundled services to retain customers. In 2023, the domestic pay TV industry lost two million customers, according to a Ficci-EY report. Telecom operators Bharti Airtel and Reliance Jio have been bundling data and content for several years. Among standalone players, DTH company Tata Play has been bundling linear TV and OTT offerings for subscribers through a single billing.

Marquee anchor investors, who participated in the anchor book include Capital Group, Fidelity Funds, ADIA, Morgan Stanley among others.

Bharti Airtel: The telecom major is anticipated to be the frontrunner in the forthcoming auction of eight spectrum bands, given that Reliance Jio has already made substantial acquisitions in the 2022 auctions and Vodafone Idea is currently grappling with financial constraints. The auction is scheduled to commence on May 20. Bharti Airtel is expected to renew its licenses for 42MHz of spectrum in the 1800MHz and 900MHz bands across six circles.

Bharti Airtel's managing director Gopal Vittal has called on the telco's 19,000-odd employees, including senior executives, across India to cancel all business meetings on Tuesday and spend the entire day on the field with customers to get a fix on service challenges they face, even as the Sunil Mittal-led telco readies to launch 5G services nationally by the month-end. The exercise is part of a national brand-building drive to position Airtel as a customer-obsessed telco that is keen on eliciting direct market feedback from its target audience on the state of its 2G, 4G and 5G mobile operations as well as home broadband services. «These interactions will help us understand customer needs on a deeper level. Tomorrow (March 12) is also an opportunity for you to discover first-hand what challenges our frontline staff face and how they serve customers,» Vittal wrote in an internal email communication to all Airtel employees Monday. ET has seen a copy of the Airtel MD's letter.

PTI-Videos, the Railway Minister said that though the work on the Kolkata Metro started in the 1970s, the progress made in the last 10 years of the Modi government was much more than the 40 years before that. -The work on Kolkata Metro progressed in several phases.

Shriram Finance, KFin Tech, Eicher Motors, TVS Motors, Coal India, L&T, Thermax, NTPC, JSW Energy, Godrej Properties, Macrotech Developers, Bharti Airtel, Honasa Consumer, Zomato, Piramal Pharma, Apollo Hospitals, Ultratech Cement, Ambuja Cement, Kajaria Ceramics, Amber Enterprises, Supreme Industries, and PI Industries. Axis Bank: Axis Bank is one of Jefferies' top picks, as it believes that past investments have made the franchise stronger and that the bank is on track to deliver 16-18% growth in loans, improve its deposit profile, and sustain ROE of 18%. Integration with Citibank’s India retail platform is progressing well with limited attrition among staff and customers and significant scope for synergies in 60 areas on revenues and cost.

telecom industry recorded 1.46% sequential growth in adjusted gross revenue (AGR) to Rs 55,583 in the fiscal second quarter FY24, latest operator performance data released by the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (Trai) on Friday showed. Higher quarterly AGR translated into higher licence fee and spectrum usage charge (SUC) collections for the Department of Telecommunications (DoT). The licence fee mop-up climbed 1.53% sequentially to Rs 5,326 crore while SUC collections rose 2.20% on-quarter to Rs 834 crore, data collated by the regulator showed. All three operators Bharti Airtel, Reliance Jio and Vodafone Idea (Vi), recorded similar growth in their respective AGR numbers.

consecration of the Ram temple on January 22, Airtel has enhanced its network infrastructure to cover all important locations, including airport, railway station, bus stand, key landmark areas and hotels in the city. The company has deployed additional network sites, placed CoWs(cell on wheels) and laid optic fibre cable to cover the entire city with uninterrupted voice and data services, Bharti Airtel said in a statement.

₹1,690 per share in today's trade. This heavyweight contributed a substantial 30.86 points to the overall rally witnessed in the index. Also Read: How will HDFC Bank, Axis Bank, SBI and others perform in 2024? 5 key trends that will determine banks' performance Similarly, Bajaj Finance shares experienced a noteworthy surge of 4.34%, reaching ₹7,705 apiece, following the release of the company's Q3FY24 update.

Honasa Consumer Venture Capital Fund Fireside Venture Investments has sold partial stake in Mamaearth parent Honasa Consumer through bulk deals on Tuesday. Bank of India Bank of India has opened the qualified institutional placement book for bidding of shares by qualified institutional buyers. The state-owned lender has set the floor price for the QIP issue at Rs 105.42 a share. Dalmia Bharat Dalmia Bharat appointed Puneet Yadu Dalmia as Managing Director and CEO of the company for a period of 5 years with effect from December 8. SBI State Bank of India said that it will acquire a 20% stake in SBI Pension Funds Pvt Ltd for Rs 229.52 crore. Union Bank of India State-owned Union Bank of India has selected global tech major Accenture to accelerate its data-driven transformation. Infosys Infosys said it has received a communication for collection of penalty from an overseas authority. Bharti Airtel Bharti Airtel said it has received an order for penalty of Rs 3.95 lakh under the CGST Act.

Open RAN (open radio access network) technology had promised a lot: It could provide a cheaper alternative to traditional telecom network deployments, challenging the might of the few infrastructure vendors operating in the market. What was expected to be a game changer, though has yet to make much headway in India, except for a few trials and deployments. Experts cite several challenges for the deployment to pick up, but say it would happen in another two-three years.

NEW DELHI : The government is unlikely to table the draft Indian Telecommunications Bill for Parliament’s approval in the upcoming winter session, said two people familiar with the development. The people said, asking not to be named, that the government intended to launch deeper inter-ministerial discussions on some of the issues, which were continuously evolving.

L&T: Larsen & Toubro reported a net profit of ₹3,222 crore in the September 2023 quarter, higher by 45% as against ₹2,229 crore reported in the year-ago period, as per the results declared by the company on October 31. The company's revenue from operations during Q2FY24 came in ₹51,024 crore, marking a jump of 19% from ₹42,762 crore reported in the corresponding quarter of the previous fiscal. Bharti Airtel: Telecom major Bharti Airtel recorded a net profit of ₹1,341 crore in the second quarter of fiscal year 2023-24 (Q2FY24), which is 37% lower than the year ago.

Jio Infocomm is chasing a ₹70,000-crore annual revenue opportunity as part of its "change India project" to connect 100 million households with broadband in the coming couple of years, a senior company executive told ET. This will be at the heart of the telecom operator's push to monetise 5G services and drive average revenue per user (ARPU). While fibre remains an important means, its fixed wireless access (FWA) offering, JioAirFiber, will be key to achieving the ambitious figure.

“Country after country as well as World Bank, United Nations, WTO, Africa Union, European Union, G20, BRICS, everyone is chanting that the digital infrastructure that India has built can accelerate the world economy, especially in those countries which have lack of infrastructure,” Bharti Airtel chairman Sunil Mittal said during the inauguration of India Mobile Congress. He also stressed about the success India has achieved in manufacturing, particularly digital infrastructure in the last few years. “I spoke about it last year that manufacturing of the scale and size which we want may not happen in India during my lifetime. But I realised that India is moving fast,” Mittal said. He highlighted that companies ranging from Apple to Dixon to Samsung and Tata’s, every company, be it small or big, are getting into manufacturing and India is emerging as a world leader in manufacturing, especially digital infrastructure.

Supreme Court's ruling to treat licence fees as a capital expenditure that could potentially prompt authorities to raise hefty retrospective demands, including penalties on operators for tax payment shortfalls of past periods. Kotak Institutional Equities estimates Bharti Airtel could face a potential tax demand (excluding penalties) of Rs 6,000 crore for 2020-23, while Reliance Jio could be stung by a Rs 8,400-crore tax demand (without penalties) for 2017-2023. Analysts expect the final tax demands to be higher. Amortisation benefits This is after factoring in potential penalties for short payment of taxes for prior periods. While there could be an initial financial impact, sector experts expect that burden to even out over the licence period, with the tax outgo for telcos likely to decline in later years once amortisation benefits accumulate.