Bharti Airtel Limited (BHARTIARTL) Q1 2027 Earnings Call Transcript

Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. I am Vaidehi Sharma, the moderator for this webinar. Welcome to the Bharti Airtel Limited and Bharti Hexacom Limited first quarter ended 30th June 2026 earnings webinar. Present with us today is the senior leadership team of Bharti Airtel and Bharti Hexacom Limited. I must remind you that the overview and discussions today may include Thank you. And start asking the question post-introduction. With this, I would now like to hand over to Mr. Gopal Vittal for his opening remarks.

Good afternoon, everybody, and welcome to the quarter one earnings call. I have with me Shashwat, Shaman, Akhil, and Naval. Let me comment on the overall performance as well as the due bets that we are focused on before I hand over to Shashwat. We delivered yet another quarter of strong performance across the group. Consolidated revenue was 58,500 crores, growing at about 5.7% sequentially. Africa maintained its strong growth trajectory, with a constant revenue growth of 5.7%. India, excluding the passive infra growth, was equally strong at 3.6% sequentially. Our consolidated EBITDA was at 29,800 crores. This was a growth of 4.2%, and the margin stood at 51%. Our operating free cash flow, which is EBITDA minus CAPEX, was at over 16,450 crores. CAPEX for the quarter was about 13,390 crores, and the operational discipline continues to remain an enabler of our strong performance with focused execution and efficiency improvements through our Warren Waste Initiative. Our consolidated net debt to EBITDA improved to 0.7, and India without passive infra is now lower than 1. The strength of our balance sheet is underpinned by our prudent capital allocation, disciplined capex, and continued operational excellence. And this is well recognized by leading global agencies, which sustained rating upgrades during the quarter. Our diversified, resilient portfolio continues to deliver strongly. Today, I want to spend a little bit of time on Africa, a market where we see a significant long-term opportunity. During the quarter, we've completed an EPS-accretive share swap transaction that increased our Airtel stake in the Africa business to over 79%. This strengthens our participation in Africa's growing profit pool and underscores our belief in the scale and durability of the opportunity We've invested significant time in understanding each market, building local execution capabilities, and developing healthy relationships with regulators and other stakeholders. This experience has also affirmed our decision to introduce Indus into Africa. Airtel's Africa operations today generate an annualized EBITDA of over 35,000 crores. And I truly believe this is a very, very rare achievement for an Indian-based company. Africa is also, as you know, an important growth engine in Airtel's portfolio, contributing, in the last one year, almost half of our consolidated revenue growth of 16-odd percent for the year. Over the last five years, the business has delivered constant currency CAGA growth of over 20 percent in revenue and over 24 percent in EBITDA, reflecting both the strength of our execution and the scale of the opportunity. The structural growth potential is supported by a powerful combination of favorable demographics, low digital penetration, and rising demand for connectivity, financial inclusion, and digital infrastructure. I believe Africa today resembles India nearly 10 years ago, a large, young, and increasingly digital population with meaningful headroom for penetration-led growth. And let me give you a few examples of this just to reinforce this. Teledensity, which is penetration, is at 45%, and smartphone penetration is only 52%, showing you the headroom available. The average median age across the continent in the markets we operate in is under 18 years, and the total population across these 14 countries is about 680 million and growing strongly. Home broadband penetration is only 2%, and there are at least 30 million households that can afford a broadband connection. The enterprise and data center opportunities remain largely untapped. We have over 82,000 kilometers of fiber with access to large submarine capacity. And finally, Airtel money has now achieved meaningful scale with a quarter one revenue of over $400 million, growing at 26% year-on-year in constant currency terms. And the opportunity ahead here remains significant. With 64% of adults across our footprint, still without access to a formal bank account. Given this growth trajectory and the large addressable opportunity, Airtel Money is now preparing for a London listing in the second half of 2026. We're investing with discipline to capitalize on multi-year opportunities across mobile, across 5G, homes, Airtel Money, B2B, and data centers. And while we're still very early in homes and B2B segments, our balance sheet gives us the capacity to build a meaningful position in each of these areas. As a group, we've brought significant heft to our ETL operations in the last 18 months. Benefits now accrue across technology, across network, across supply chain, and talent. And we operate far more cohesively, translating these efforts into stronger operation, execution, and operating excellence. We've called out three additional areas for group cohesion. B2B, where both solutions and go-to-market capability is replicated across the continent. On homes, all of the lessons that we've learned in India are now extended into Africa. Energy efficiency is another key area of focus. We're working with Indus to deploy high energy efficiency power equipment and advanced energy storage solutions aimed at reducing diesel dependence across sites. We've also looked at the opportunity to extend our digital platforms, which has stepped up the execution capability within the business. So we believe going forward, there is very large opportunity around synergy for across the India business, Indus Towers, Airtel Payments Bank, and our Africa operations. Let me provide a brief update on our new growth bets. And let me start with our financial services portfolio. We recently went live with our lending services, marking an important milestone in our financial services journey. We've done this at remarkable speed in just about nine months from the date of the application of the license. And the real reason for this, which is the secret sauce inside Airtel, is that we have reused all of our digital platforms. So our data platforms, our CLM platform, as well as our channel platform are now in the NBFC as the same platform that we've been using inside the telco. The momentum is building, and we're excited by the opportunity as we work towards making simple and secure financial services more accessible to a wider set of customers. Airtel Payments Bank, which is another engine of our financial services portfolio, continues to deliver strong performance. We ended quarter one with a monthly transacting user base of around $120 million. The annualized revenue run rate is now over 3,400 crores, and deposits remain strong at a shade under 4,400 crores, growing at 17% year-on-year. Both these businesses are integrated by what we call our storefront, which is Airtel Finance. This storefront, Airtel Finance, covers lending through our NBFC as well as some partners, transacting, which is our payments bank, We have some early moves on savings through fixed deposits, and more such engagement options are planned. In fact, the total loan disbursements through Etel Finance is now at over 750 crores per month. Using our digital capabilities, we have a proven model to deliver lower delinquencies, lower cost of acquisition, and lower collection costs. We believe these capabilities will help us scale our NBFC and the payments bank. The second growth bet is data centers. The business is on a strong growth trajectory with sustained revenue growth. We believe that our market share here at about 12% is clearly low for the large heft and size that we have as a company. We're working towards our ambition to build one gigawatt in the next few years. Many of those contracts have been stitched up. We're also in the process of acquiring more land in the right locations. And in the coming quarters, as we finalize some of these landmark deals, you will hear more progress, more progress update from us. The other area of focus is Etel Cloud. We continue to see a strong momentum here, with almost all critical services now live on our platform. Over the quarter, we've added 11 new customers, taking the total customer count to 33. The strength and readiness of our platform is reflected in all of the certifications that we received from Métis, amongst others, which will further strengthen our go-to-market proposition. We believe this business needs four things to really succeed. The right talent, capital that we have already invested, the go-to-market capabilities that we have, and the right solutions for continuing to build out what customers need. We're stepping up significant investments to continue to invest behind this in order to scale this. With this, let me hand over to Shashwath for an update on the India business.

Thank you, Gopal, and a very good afternoon to everyone. I'll first share an update on each of our business segments in India, followed by an update on our strategic priorities. Let me start with mobile. This quarter, we added 3.3 million revenue earning customers and 5 million smartphone data customers. We added 1 million postpaid customers this quarter, which is the highest level addition in any quarter for us. Postpaid customers now account for 8% plus of our total customer base. Our R2 for the quarter came in at at least 264, which also had the benefit of an extra day during the quarter. Homes, we delivered a net ads of 473,000, which is a moderation over our previous few quarters trajectory. I will talk about this in detail in the strategy section. Digital TV, we added 6,000 more customers during this quarter, led by a strong adoption of IPTV. Our IPTV take rates continue to improve and deliver on our convergence agenda that we have been driving in the business. Air-to-business revenue came in at about 5,670 crores, growing 3.2% sequentially and nearly 12% over last year. The quarter saw large deal wins across core connectivity and digital portfolio, as well as we have visibility on sustained growth in the quarters to come on B2B. Our digital businesses delivered another quarter of solid performance, with revenue growth of nearly 6% sequentially. We are seeing strong traction across our portfolio, including cloud, cybersecurity, IoT, digital platforms, and CPaaS. And we are seeing some notable deal wins during the quarter. Let me now move to the strategic pillars and start with quality customers. In the home segment, we still see a market opportunity which remains very significant. Demand for high-speed connectivity continues to be supported by rising smart TV penetration, higher concurrent usage within households, and rapidly evolving data consumption needs. Majority of this demand is concentrated across the top 1,000 towns, and this is shaping where we invest and how we serve this market. Our strategy in homes is centered on building a high-quality customer base through differentiated services and a seamless experience across our touchpoints. Over the last couple of quarters, we have drawn important learnings from our FWA expansion. While low entry-level pricing helped attract customers, the outcomes were not consistent with the quality of customers' franchise we wanted to build, with a higher churn and weaker continuity in certain cohorts. In addition, rising global memory and chipset pricing have also challenged FWA economics. We have responded to this with discipline. We have tightened acquisition quality, doubled down on improving our churn, and driving towards Our conviction in sustainable growth in homes is to accelerate fiber and deploy FWA with sharper precision where the economics and customer quality are compelling. This is already beginning to show momentum through the last few months and weeks as we have gone through this. Leveraging fixed mobile conversions on top of this is central to our home strategy. Our 180 plan brings these services together through a proposition that offers greater convenience, flexibility and value for our customers, and we are seeing promising adoption. Convergence will be an important lever to deepen our relationship with our customers and reduce churn. Let me now switch to mobile. Our focus remains on accelerating R2 growth through portfolio premiumization on mobile, while continuing to maintain a competitive share of customer negotiations. Postpaid is a key R2 growth lever for us, with significant opportunity ahead of us. Our recently launched Passlane technology, leveraging network slicing on 5G, is delivering the differentiation on postpaid, which is driving an acceleration of the business. For upgrading customers here, we are focused on driving persuasion, simplification of our journeys, and superior value discovery across all our channels. Within prepaid itself, we continue to see a large opportunity to move customers to their most relevant plans by using customer context and next best action capabilities that we have developed on our additional stack. In addition, handset upgrades from feature phones to smartphones, rising data usage, 5G adoption, and international roaming provide meaningful headroom for ARCO expansion going forward. I do want to reiterate that the longer-term pricing architecture of the industry still needs to be repaired, and the industry must charge for data consumption. This is paramount for sustained ARCO growth in the longer term. Let me now turn to B2B. Enterprise demand is moving beyond traditional connectivity, creating significant opportunities across our portfolio. We are approaching this opportunity with a clear execution plan across three areas. First is to build a world-class infrastructure, expanding our fiber availability, strengthening quality to deliver flatless networks, augmenting our subsea capacity, deepening our data centers, and data center-to-data center connectivity with OPGW infrastructure. Over the last three years, we have deployed about 139,000 kilometers of fiber, and we believe sustained investments in this infrastructure layer is critical to meeting our enterprise demand. Second, we are scaling up our digital services portfolio across cybersecurity, IoT, CPaaS, SD-WAN, and cloud. And third, we are raising the bar on account management as well as our delivery and assurance. And all these initiatives are beginning to deliver positive outcomes and are helping for us to accelerate our business. The second pillar of our strategy is the obsession with offering brilliant customer experience. Customer experience remains at the heart of our strategy and underpins everything we do, from network investments to digital innovation. We are investing in upgrading our transport layer and building advanced 5G capabilities. Network slicing is a key enabler of this strategy, which is helping us improve our 5G network efficiency, expand effective capacity, and deliver differentiated experience for our customers. Our converged data engine, which powers the digital experience layer, enabling faster execution and customer engagement with greater precision, is at the core of our growth. By bringing together customer context, data intelligence, and digital tools, it allows us to deliver more personalized and contextual interventions across the lifecycle of the customer. The third pillar of our strategy is to build and leverage our digital capabilities, and here we are using AI to reimagine how work The focus is on combining data, intelligence, and automation in ways that improve speed, precision, and consistency across the business. I will share a few highlights from the quarter that's gone by. We continue to progress and scale our AI for personalization, spam production, and call center operations. This is something I called out last quarter as well. Our real-time and context-based decisioning has now expanded to 7.7 billion next best actions and this is now lit up across all our channels, led by Airtelthanks app. Since its launch, our AI-led anti-spam solution has identified over 93 billion spam calls and 4 billion spam messages and blocked over 1.4 million fraudulent links. Customer interactions through our call center, VoiceBot, has increased to 309 million in this quarter. I'm happy to report that this quarter, we were able to make a meaningful difference in our delivered workmanship across 30,000 field engineers with the health of AI. With a patented technology that allows inferencing on the endpoint device rather than the cloud, we are now leveraging real-time image processing to standardize workmanship in our operations. This is leading to a step change in quality of installs and fault repair and enforcing adherence of safety measures on ground, which remains a very important priority across the business. All of this transformation is led by a homegrown agentic platform with a clear focus on creating cost-efficient automation and compute, and having clear guardrails for customer safety, privacy, and sovereignty of what we do. The fourth pillar of our strategy is bottom-based. This remains a core pillar to drive cost discipline across the environment. Over the last five years, we have optimized over 11,000 crores from our network OPEX, reflecting the depth and consistency of this program. We have further sharpened our focus on identifying and eliminating waste across the portfolio. This includes redesigning our ways of working and taking decisive actions to mitigate cost pressures, including redesigning our tower operations to eliminate diesel consumption and making sharp choices in the way we deploy capex in home business. These efforts have helped us in navigating this phase of global cost headwinds in the business. At the same time, we recognize that there is considerable work ahead to be done to building a more efficient, resilient, and sustainable operating model. So to sum up, overall, we have delivered another quarter of strong performance, supported by the strength of our diversified portfolio, and sharp execution across all our businesses. Looking ahead, we continue to see significant growth opportunities across our businesses, which is growing mobility output, accelerating growth in homes, and scaling our B2B businesses. We are investing across our digital portfolio and new growth engines that will strengthen Ento's future readiness and support sustainable long-term growth. Obsession with brilliant customer experience remains our driving force. And now, we are reimagining our processes with the world of AI to enhance productivity, step change our experience, and drive operating leverage. With that, let me hand it over back to Gadeek to open up the Q&A session. Thank you.

Thank you very much, Ashwath. We will now begin the Bharti Airtel Q&A interactive session for all the participants. Please note that the Q&A session will be restricted to the analyst and investor community only. Due to time constraints, we would request if you could limit the number of questions to two per participant to enable more participation. Interested participants may click on Raise Hand option on your Zoom application to join the Q&A queue. Upon announcement of name, participants to kindly click on Unmute Myself in the pop-up screen and start asking the question post-introduction. Participants are requested to limit their questions to Bharti Airtel till 12pm as management will start asking the questions 1pm onwards. With this, the first question comes from Mr. Piyush Chaudhary. Mr. Chaudhary, you may please unmute your side, introduce yourself, and ask your question now.

Hi, thanks for the opportunity. This is Piyush from HSBC. Two questions. Firstly, on the mobile ARPU, what led to strong improvement quarter-on-quarter? Or was there any product revamp or some specific plan adoption roles like Fastlane? Any color over here would be useful. And should we expect this trend to be sustainable in absence of Terrifyc? Secondly, on ATL business, you've delivered a very strong growth year on year. Can you break down the levers of such growth into various subsegments like connectivity, cloud, data center? And if you can discuss the outlook of this. You know, is this kind of number sustainable? Thank you.

Shashwat, why don't you take the first question? I'll take the second one.

Yeah, sure. So, thank you for that question. And I think on mobile ARPU, as we said, we see substantial headroom within the current customer base itself, the way we are structured, because there's enough upgrade that's happening, which is driven by consumption of data, moving to unlimited plans, As well as an acceleration on the post-pid with the differentiation we have brought with Fastlane technology. So I think it's a combination. We see a reasonable handroom in front of us to continue this momentum in the midterm. Long term, as I spoke, I think the pricing architecture will have to repair. With charging for data and consumption becoming the norm, if we have to see this kind of a long-term sustainable. But I think in the midterm, there's enough and more we have here.

You know, I think on the B2B side, like you mentioned, I think our portfolio comprises of three types of businesses. One is the connectivity business. Second is our wholesale business, which tends to operate at low margins. And the third is the digital businesses that we have within B2B, which is our data center, cloud, CPaaS, IoT, cybersecurity, and so on. Over the last couple of years, we have seen sustained growth in our digital businesses, and it's now beginning to accelerate. The problem that we've had in the business in the past has been that we have had a lot of dependence on wholesale, which is subject to a lot of price pressure as also movement of messaging away from SMS to things like WhatsApp and so on and so forth. The connectivity business has been sort of the market grows at a low single digits. So what we have seen in the quarter is a step up in our digital businesses as we are, you know, continuing to make investments across all of these areas. And also a step up in the connectivity side of the portfolio, particularly on the global side, as we want some of the, you know, some larger deals, which, which has impacted the quarter. And I think that bodes well, even for the underlying margin of the business this quarter.

Got it. Thank you, Gopal. And Shashwat.

The next question comes from Mr. Vivekanand Subharaman. Mr. Subharaman, you may please unmute your side. Introduce yourself and ask your question now.

Yeah, hi, I'm Vivekanand from Ambit. I have two questions. So, the first one is on the CAPEX. So, I understand that your annual CAPEX is likely to be in the 4 billion ballpark. Just to drill down a bit further on this, how much Reallocation of this CAPEX is happening towards projects like AI infrastructure, which include data centers, sub-sea cables, and sovereign compute. And how does 5G standalone also play a role in respect to the overall CAPEX number? That's the first one. The second one is on the B2B revenue mix. Yes. So, Gopal, thanks for giving color on Piyush's question. Just to look at this business a bit further down the line, with increased share from digital services, which are, let's say, asset light and low margin, like CPaaS or digital, how do you expect the overall ATL business EBITDA margins to trend over the next two to three years? And if you can talk about, let's say, the conversion cycles for the recent deals that you've signed in Airtel Cloud and translation into revenue, that'll be great. Thank you.

Well, you know, so I think with detail on the CapEx, Shamin can come in. But we have, I would just say that, you know, the radio CapEx has moderated across the portfolio over the last couple of years. So I think that is clear. Yes, there will be some step-ups based on what happens in the competitive sphere, but broadly, it is sort of moderated. Core CapEx is small. The large part of our CapEx is going on transport, as well as, you know, which includes all of the stuff around fiber and, you know, fibering up the country and so on and so forth. And that, by the way, includes homes as well. So I include that as part of the transport. We, you know, for 5G standalone, the CapEx is very modest because it's largely software. Like we've said, it's just a switch of a button. And, you know, many of these, you know, the investments over the next couple of years, we will now continue to rapidly sort of scale up our data center portfolio as we are building out from the 120, 130 megawatts all the way to a gigawatt over the next few years. So there is going to be a period of rapid CapEx spend that you will see. And within that, you know, the overall CapEx pool, we will have to sort of see how to be moderated. I think my message would be that wherever we think that there is a legitimate need for the business in order to step up growth, in order to be competitive, or to actually plant some of these new updates, you know, as a company, we will not hold back on CapEx. On the B2B revenue mix, your question was on margins as the portfolio retools. I think the fact is that this business is a clutch of different businesses. When you look at areas like cybersecurity and CPaaS, margins are low because, as you rightly pointed out, investment is low. But however, if you look at, you know, the connectivity side, the margins there are very healthy. IoT, the margins are very healthy. But in cloud and data centers, there is a significant investment as well. So it's not that, you know, these are light, you know, investment sort of options. So there is heavier investment. And again, the margins are commensurate with the kind of investments. I think longer term, as the portfolio retools, we think the margins, you know, will be in this ballpark, maybe sort of trend slightly downwards, as we see the step up in the digital portfolio. But the real metric for us that we should be looking at is faster revenue growth, because ultimately, this market, as we repeatedly stressed, is very large. And all of it depends on our ability to execute. So whether it's data center, whether it's cloud, these are very large markets, very fast-growing markets, and it is our ability to execute that is the limitation, which requires not just capital, but requires talent, it requires the right kind of solutions, and of course, it requires replicable business practices, go-to-market practices. So that is the way we see this business. Shaman, is there anything else to add on the CapEx?

No, Gopal, you have covered CapEx.

Right. Thank you, Gopal, for the commentary. Just one follow up. We saw that you raised a billion dollars at Nextra to accelerate the investments in that business. So, Gopal, just to understand your CapEx strategy, since you are stepping up and raising external funding at a relatively early stage in data centers, is it fair to say that you're on wherever you see any meaningful steps? Jump in KPEX, you will look for external sponsorship, or do you lean on your own balance sheet? What are the considerations on whether to use Airtel's own balance sheet to step up versus targeted fundraise at an entity level?

I think we've crossed that bridge when we come to it. The fact is that Nextra will need funding, and that funding will be, you know, obviously there's some equity infusion, But there will also be debt that will be raised at Nextra, whether it comes off our balance sheet and goes into Nextra or comes from outside. I think that's a decision we need to take over time. But the fact is that Nextra will need to lever up in order to build out what is required over the next few years. Shaman, anything to add on this?

No, Gopal. I think, as you said, we will take this call as and when it appears. There was an opportunity which presented itself in Nextra, and we have used that opportunity.

All right. Thanks, Gopal and Swamin. All the very best.

The next question comes from Mr. Sanjesh Jain. Mr. Jain, you may please unmute your side, introduce yourself, and ask your question now.

Thank you. Good afternoon for taking my question. I got three questions and one bookkeeping question. First on the fast lane, what has been the experience of the customer, or if you would have studied, how much improvement has the customer felt by moving on to the fast lane, and will this opportunity attract even more customers, and does it offer an opportunity for us to grab higher market share in post-pay? That's number one. Number two, on the data center business, Gupal, when you mentioned that we are scaling up Nextra from 120, 130 megawatt to one gigawatt hour, this also includes the contract we signed with Google, or this is purely the colo which Nextra is looking to do, that's second. And one on the FWA, Shashwath, you mentioned that there is an increase in churn, and we are making a change in terms of the customer acquisition strategy. What was the churn rate, and does this really materially change the growth rate? Because when we talk about the churn, that means there were customers which were slipping also. So, fairly, we should be able to maintain the run rate, which we have been doing in the FWA despite the churn rate. These are the three questions. And one on the bookkeeping, finance costs in Africa, particularly, does ATL money what it pays interest on the leverage, which it does, that also get captured in the interest costs? These are my four questions. Thank you.

I'll take the Parcelain and the FWA one, and then I'll hand over to you for the DC and finance process. So Sanjeej, thank you. On the Parcelain one, I just want to touch upon the fact that, look, what happens with the slicing technology is we are able to, the SAS slicing technology makes the network more efficient. We are able to generate more capacity in the network. At an empty network level, it does not make a substantial, tangible difference. But when the networks get congested, when you are in a crowd, those are the kind of places where it starts showing up in a differential experience. We have had some places, but overall net-net, we have been able to demonstrate that the customers on Fastlane see a differential experience technically. But in reality, in In an empty network, it does not make a difference. Having said that, the interest of getting customers to upgrade using Fastlane as a reassurance of a superior experience is working well for us. And we've seen positive signs of that. We've seen some acceleration and interest in the business. And we continue to see this as a large growth pillar for us going forward. On fixed wireless access, Sanjish, I'll just touch upon that. I think the real issue there was the fact that we went down on very aggressive low acquisition pricing in the market, and that led to some round-tripping and quality of acquisition deteriorating. That we have to pull back, Sanjesh, in terms of what we are seeing there. So I think that's a place where we are seeing constant month-on-month improvement. Whether we come back to old rates and all, we'll see the more important thing for us right now is to constantly grow the business, grow to the right unit economics, and we want to double down much more on fiber and use FWA with the right outcomes. I think that really is the focus for us right now.

You want to finish the finance course, please, Shaman? Yeah. So, yes, Airtel Money is added into overall Airtel, Africa and us. But you must remember that Airtel Money Limited is a net cash positive company. So, there is no net interest cost, and whatever little cost is there is a part of cost of goods sold. Having said that, there are some derivatives at some upstream costs, which appears in interest cost and gets consolidated in interest cost. Over to you, all of the data centers.

Yeah, I think the data center is a simple answer. Yes, the Google one is also included. I just want to come back to the fast lane. I think, you know, what we have seen is that very clearly for customers on the slice, they're getting better speeds, right? But the fact is that for all customers, the speeds have improved because the network has become more efficient. So it's a combination of both things that we're seeing. And then, of course, there is the additional piece that there is a very large opportunity of customers who are sitting on what we believe should be postpaid, but are sitting on prepaid, where the headroom for growth for postpaid is very, very large. And I think this is something that we need to get right over the course of the coming years.

Thanks. Thanks, Gupal. Just one on data center again. What gives us confidence of scaling up to one gigawatt hour? Are we seeing that kind of a demand in India, which can allow, because there are multiple operators and everybody is talking of a gigawatt hour. And today, India is at roughly 1.5 gigawatt hour. So what gives us a confidence and do we have a strong pipeline, which gives this confidence for us?

Yes, we do. The short answer to your question is yes, we do. And just to give a little bit more texture to it, you know, the data center market comprises, as you know, of both hyperscalers and domestic enterprises. Within the hyperscaler segment, a very large part of the workloads run off Mumbai. And therefore, one of the key considerations for building, getting to one gigawatt is the right land parcels in Mumbai, which we're in the process of sort of finalizing. So that is the first piece. The second part is the existing contracts as you alluded to on Google. The third is upcoming build that is already well underway. And, you know, that will be a couple of hundred megawatts over the course of the next couple of years. And then there is a small gap of the need to fill the balance with the land parcels that we are looking at in Mumbai, where we believe that with those parcels, we should be able to fill it. So, you know, the reason we have gone out on a limb to say that our ambition is to get to a gigawater in the next few years is because we have very clear line of sight to actually get there.

That's great. Thanks, Gopal, Shashwath, and Shomain, answering all those questions and best of luck for the coming quarters.

The next question comes from Sumangal Navatia. Mr. Navatia, you may please unmute your side, introduce yourself, and ask your question now.

All right. Yeah, good afternoon. This is Sumangal from Kotak Securities. Firstly, congratulations to the team on another stellar quarter. I have two or three questions. First, on the homes. So if you see margins are under pressure, and it's been the lowest in the recent past, sub additions are also been lowest in the past seven, eight quarters. So just want to understand, is it a conscious slowdown, given the cost inflation, which you touched upon initially? Or is it a high base catch? That's first. Second, on overall data, sub-addition is continuing very strongly. So, with regards to the issues of price inflation in the smartphone, is the underlying trend too strong to have an impact here or something which could be an issue or a headwind going forward given the inflation in the smartphones? And lastly, you've touched upon this, but just some more color on the B2B CapEx. I mean, it's been quite volatile, still around mid-teens in terms of revenue. So given our plans, is the actual spend pickup more medium term and not near term? If I can get some more color on the cadence here.

Yeah. I think on the B2B CapEx, I think the material difference that will actually take place is the rapid build-out on the data center side. On cloud, we already finished the investments in the first round across the three regions that we operate. And as it fills out, we will keep adding. That's a modular investment. The data center will be lumpy as the build or large tracts of land are required. So that's, that will sort of show up over the coming, coming quarters. And let me just finish up the point on the homes. I think Shachar has already alluded to it. The fact is that we were, you know, there was, there was, there was poor acquisition quality that's been tightened substantially. And therefore, that has led to a reduction in, in the customer ads. We're already seeing, you know, traction in the, in the last couple of weeks on, on this being repaired, because this is obviously a short term hit. But it at least builds a business for the future. And we believe that we should start seeing momentum coming back from here onwards. And where it ends up, we'll look at. On the data side, there's a lot of refurbished phones that are still being circulated. That number has gone up with inflation. So we see strong sub-additions. But over time, how this inflation impacts the customer wallet is yet to be seen. But at this point, we see no impact on that.

Got it. Thank you, and all the best.

The next question comes from Mr. Gaurav Rateria. Mr. Rateria, you may please unmute your side, introduce yourself, and ask your question now.

Hi, this is Gaurav from Morgan Stanley. I have a couple of questions. My first is on your B2B portfolio. Is it fair to say the largest TAM there will be for the cloud business? What has been our USP to win those 30 plus customers that you talked about? And at what point in time, it will start making a difference to the overall growth rate in the portfolio? Second question is around home. Is there a market share target that you're looking at from an FWA perspective? I know that you look at the consolidated home broadband portfolio as a one portfolio, including FWA and the fiber, right? But is there a target market share that you're looking at, or you will start caring about the market share below a certain threshold? And the last question is on your Airtel finance portfolio. Like, how are you trying to manage the conflict, if at all, with your other partners that you have in the Airtel finance app versus your own NBFC, which is also, you know, becoming one of the partners in your business? Thank you.

Yeah, I think on the B2B side, you know, we've had a lot of lessons learned the last few months as we've gone out to the market. I think the first lesson is that, you know, the decision making in a business like this has longer gestation. And the reason is quite simple. These are important workloads, and for customers to move from, whether it is the premise, or whether it is repatriating from a hyperscale cloud, or whether it is to move from a private co-located cloud that they have, the integration effort and the task involved is quite high. The second, of course, is that if you are already on a different cloud player, then sometimes you have egress costs, which are high, which also become the barrier. So the gestation period for a decision is large. The second is that we find that commercialization, which really is a function of the ability to move those workloads, because a lot of this gets paid on a per-use basis, is a muscle that needs to be built. And I think those are the two lessons. The third lesson is how do you package this and bundle this release intelligently? So where we are seeing traction is around simple propositions, which can be easily bought. For example, disaster recovery, backup as a service, storage as a service. These are video surveillance as a service. These are where we've won a lot of the deals that we've won over the last quarter. The one place where the deals are large is the need for sovereign clouds where there are more sensitive workloads. This is largely in the regulated spheres or in the PSU spheres. And these are the areas where a lot of the certification work that is going on is underway. And finally, what the business needs is it needs to be incubated separately. And the model that we've got is that the incubation is being done within the business. We are now trying to build a top-notch talent group within that business to actually build it, but yet depend on the B2B go-to-market teams to open the door so that all of the rest of the stuff on the technical sales and solutions, And architecting can be done by the cloud team. On Airtel Finance, yes, there can always be, you can always argue there will be a perceived conflict, but we don't believe there's any conflict. Because even if you look at some of the very large NBFCs in India, you do find that they also have an LSP or a storefront, and they work with partners. So we are, you know, and then there are also obviously some RBI regulations, which dictate the way that we need to operate within the LSP segment. And therefore, we will abide by that and make sure that we are totally, you know, meeting all of the compliance requirements that the business needs. We do not set a target for FWS. We only set a target for home broadband. And we don't believe that we should have a target for a technology. We believe we have a target for a customer and a business. And that is really our focus.

Thank you.

The next question comes from Aditya Suresh. Mr. Suresh, you may please unmute your side. Introduce yourself and ask your question now.

Yeah, thank you. Two questions. First on Africa. So, Gopal, maybe in very broad terms, given your trust on the Africa business, can you maybe speak about what sort of contribution you see Africa scaling to over the next, say, three to five years, whether it be EBITDA, investor capital, any other frame of reference you'd like to use? The second question is something we've tried to ask before, but it's not only your return on average capital employed. Per your kind of data pack, we're now above 20%. As you can drive your top line, there are several levers, as you've pointed out. Is there any reason why you think that the ROAC would not expand at least 500 basis points over the next three years?

On Africa, I think, like I said, I think the structural factors that are prevalent in the continent make for a very, very compelling opportunity for our business. And we're very excited about the fact that the business is now on a sustained momentum of 20% plus capital growth. We believe the headroom for growth continues to be high. And my sense is that all of the things that we have learned as a group are now being cohesively driven. So whether it's the war on waste program, whether it's the technology platforms being transferred, whether it's talent fungibility, whether it is procurement, all of these are now deeply embedded into Africa. And over the last 18 months, Ramon and I have worked very closely with the Africa team to make sure that all of this is now very, very deeply embedded. And you can see the results of that already translating into the marketplace. I think the step up in growth is because we bring the same rigor and the same de-averaging that we've seen work so very well in India for the last few years. I mean, suffice it to say that Africa, we expect it to punch above its weight. So today, if you look at the contribution of the Africa business to our portfolio, we expect that the contribution to growth will be substantially higher than the base contribution to the business, which means that the contribution of Africa will keep growing in the overall portfolio. And the second thing I would say is that the investments into Africa will continue to step up. We've already stepped it up, as you know. But that said, remember, Africa operates in a very different environment because the market structure is typically two to three players. In most markets, it's two players. In some markets, it's three. Spectrum is quite cheap. You get large quant pools of spectrum. And that means that your investment really is on the network, is on transport, because in some countries, it's landlocked. So you need to build a lot of fiber. So that's where the investment is going. And of course, there is also investment going in the homes business. On return on capital, I think, you know, I would just simply say that, look, our focus right now is, if we can continue to grow the business, extract operating leverage, then those are outcomes that come out. And we don't set those as, you know, as targets, because there are different ways of actually meeting that, including making short term decisions on reducing capex. And that is something that we don't do as a business. So, we will fund whatever is required to grow this business, our focus is growth, and yet operate in a fiscally prudent way on both cost as well as CapEx spend so that we continue to drive growth across our portfolio.

Thank you.

The next question comes from Mr. Manish Adukia. Mr. Adukia, you may please unmute your side, introduce yourself, and ask your question now.

Yes, hi, good afternoon. This is Manisha Dukia from Goldman Sachs. Thank you for taking my questions. I have two questions, one on India and one on Africa. On India first, and Shashat, going back to your earlier comments around ARPU, that in the medium term, you do see enough headroom for growth from organic levers, and it's only maybe in the long term, or maybe over the long term, you do see the pricing architecture get resolved. So first, part of the question is, are you suggesting that in your own opinion assessment, in the near term, you don't see that pricing architecture get corrected, and all growth in ARPU will be organic, and over maybe a slightly longer time period, you could see that pricing architecture correct. Perfect. And unlike in the past, where we used to see maybe, let's say, a tariff hike every couple of years, it's like safe to say that now we may be in a more infrequent tariff hike cycle. And the second related question on that particular topic is, again, going on return on capital for the India business now, you know, mid to high teens, post-tax return on capital. And I get the part about pricing architecture not being correct. But why, when you're already seeing decent growth in the business with good operating leverage, do you really need price hike at all when your organic return on capital continues to improve quarter-on-quarter? So that's my first question. I'll come back on the Africa question after that. Thank you.

Go ahead, Shashwath. I will just comment very briefly on pricing and Shashwath, I'll hand over to you. I just want you to know that the most important thing is to repair the architecture. So, when we talk about disrepair, or we talk about lack of repair, it is actually the architecture, which means that for a very low level of pricing, you get unlimited data, and that means ARPU is capped. That, to me, is not a healthy way to operate, because if you look at, and we've talked about this before, any market that is capped, you have an architecture which goes from small, medium, large to extra large. And so if you just operate with a more sensible price architecture, my view is, in the next five to seven years, you will see sustained growth just on account of ARPU, as India gets more affluent, etc., of 4% to 5%, maybe slightly higher. That, I think, would be a good place to go. And there is no need to touch the entry-level pricing. So, the entry-level pricing is, I think, is good enough. And so, I think the way that we now need to think about price architectures and industry needs to fundamentally change over the next few years. Shashwath, over to you.

Yeah, Gopal, nothing much to add. I think that's the reality and I think how this plays out in the future is very difficult to comment on, honestly. As soon as we can correct this architecture, it will be great, but it needs… we can't do it single-hand. I think that's the larger point, so we'll have to watch this. So no more, I think nothing else to add here. Rossi Gopal, you want to take up? Hi, Rossi, why should we therefore worry about pricing?

No, I mean, as I said, I think, you know, there are outcomes. And what's more important is to have a more sensible architecture.

Sure, no help. My second question on Africa and, you know, partly also related to Indus. Now, Indus today is expanding to three markets in Africa. From a Bharti Airtel perspective or Airtel Africa perspective, first, can you just talk about some of the advantages that you would get at Airtel Africa by having Indus? And how does that impact Airtel Africa's own OPEX and CAPEX by having Indus versus using somebody else's towers? And again, a related question on that is, Indus is starting off with three markets in Africa, but is it safe to say that over a period of time, and maybe given your, let's say, whatever feedback you get from your first three markets,

So, Manish, first of all, yes, there are a lot of benefits on Indus going into Africa. If you see the Africa tower co-industry, very high costs, very high rentals, and so on and so forth. Indus presents a very viable alternative to the current players. Because they bring the low-cost architecture which has been developed in India. They replicate that. Also, whatever improvements, whether it is on construction, whether it is on digitization, whether it is on energy management, the observability of the performance of the towers, everything gets immediately replicated to Africa from day one. So it is certainly better for Africa, Airtel Africa, in terms of OPEC's performance, both on rental IPTs as well as possibly even on energy. And the sheer observability will tell them to get more efficient. About getting into more countries, that's a future thing I can't comment, but if this goes well and they're able to manage in a very, and remember, it's a very lean structure. Indus is not building a whole organizational setup. They're running it very lean with remote monitoring. So if that works, why not to some other markets as well? But as of now, we are focusing on getting it right on these three markets, but it's a very, very exciting opportunity.

Thank you for answering my questions. All the best.

The next question comes from Pranav Shatriya. Mr. Shatriya, you may please unmute your side, introduce yourself, and ask your question now.

Yeah, hi, this is Ali from Mutilal Oswal.

Hello. Yeah, this is Pranav Shatriya from MK Global. I have three questions. First question is, you know, your commentary about FWA, where you said that, you know, increased memory prices are sort of impacting the unit economics of that business. So memory slash chip prices have been, you know, pretty high, and they might continue to be so, whereas, you know, we are seeing the competition sort of expanding. Can you quantify how much is the impact of, you know, the customer acquisition because of chip prices going up? And, you know, how, I mean, would you sort of take this pause for the memory prices to correct? Or you want to, you know, react when the, if the competition is doing more, you might want to spend more and get the customers. Second question is on the international roaming. In the previous quarter, you have hinted that, you know, the West Asia crisis led to certain decline in the international roaming. How that is trended? And is it normalized in this quarter? Or, you know, there should be some improvement which can happen in the next quarter also because of that. My third question is regarding, you know, Shashwet, your comment on the AI. You said that, you know, you are using an endpoint device, you know, which does inferencing locally. Does that mean that, you know, you have developed some sort of small language model, which is run on the, you know, the field engineer's device and, you know, they work for the inferencing accordingly? Those are my three questions. Thank you.

So I think, first of all, on this AI piece, and internationally, there are straightforward answers, I think, yes, on the AI piece, we are putting a small language model, which works on the endpoint device of the engineer, which runs on a regular handset. And this is a breakthrough of our engineering team, which we are using in-house. On international roaming, we are seeing improvement. I think, obviously, from previous quarter, we have started seeing some repair and improvement of international travel. Nothing more to report there beyond this. On FWF, I do want to call out that the customer acquisition number and memory prices are, in a way, we have to look at it separately because the numbers we're seeing is linked to the correction of quality of acquisition and the acquisition prices that we have. It's also coincided with the phase where memory prices have gone up, and therefore we are finding it much better to run, one, Fiber has much better economics, lesser turn, lesser cost. Second is, you have on FWA, and we need to actually look at redesigning that our unit economics of this also works better. So I think there's a plethora of work going on to get this unit economics, right? But I'm just saying, you know, we should not correlate memory prices to the net ads number I think in the bottom.

Just to follow up on that, does that mean that, you know, the impact is on FW and, you know, the fiber rollout does not really get impacted because fiber also requires some of those memory chips and, you know,

let me just come in here for now. I think we are very consistent that for us, the first port of call is fiber. We've said this for the last few years. Fiber has actually greater longevity, greater permanence, concurrency, uplink, downlink works. The churn tends to be lower because it just works brilliantly. And that's like long term. Fiber is the best place to actually go. Second point to make is the market is fundamentally in 400 cities, right? And, you know, almost 95 odd percent of the market is in 400 cities. In these 400 cities, we are there with fiber. So we are actually doubling down on fiber and the memory prices that have gone up on the fiber side, the copper and a little bit on this router is actually modest. And we are fine to actually absorb that. On the fixed wireless axis, there are two challenges. One is, you know, installing it in the wrong place actually leads to problems. So you then have poor experience. Installing it with poor quality of acquisition leads to a double whammy because now you have to run around collecting that box back rather than actually like putting it in the right place and, you know, sustaining the business. So for a variety of reasons, we have decided to pivot to Fiber and make sure that fixed wireless access only goes where Fiber is not accessible. That is really the reason that there has been a slowdown in the fixed wireless side of the business, which as we pivot to fiber and get FWA into the right locations, we are seeing momentum come back. I think that is really the bottom line of this. And just to add to what Shashwar said on the endpoint piece, fundamentally what is happening is we were spending, let's say, 30, 35 crores on these workloads being run on the cloud. Now that it is being done at the device through the small language model, on the device itself, the cost has gone down to zero. So I think it's a very big breakthrough, and we feel that actually this can be extended into our stores and many other areas. So that is really an additional color I wanted to provide.

Oh, that's excellent. Thank you so much for comprehensive answers and wish you all the very best. Thank you.

Thank you very much, everyone. I would now like to remind the participants to kindly stay connected on the call for the next session on Bharti Hexacom. I would now like to pass over to Gopal for his closing remarks on Bharti Airtel.

Thank you very much. I think it's been a thank you for all the questions and I look forward to seeing you again next quarter.

Thank you very much, Gopal. With this, I would now like to hand over the call to Mr. Swamundray for his opening remarks on Bharti Hexacom.

Thank you, Veide. Good afternoon, everyone. Welcome to the Bharti Hexacom Q1 FY2027 call. I have with me Kartik and Naval on the call. Let me start with a quick update of our Q1 performance. We delivered another quarter of strong performance with revenue at 2,510 crores, growing 4% sequentially. EBITAL for the quarter came in at about 1,210 crores with a margin of 48.2%. We ended the quarter with mobile customer base of 29 million, with net customer additions for the quarter coming in at about 210,000. Smartphone customer additions were strong at $344,000. Our pool for the quarter was $259,000, which benefited from one extra day as well. Our homes, offices, and other businesses continues to stream strong momentum with net ads of $75,000, resulting in revenue growth of about 8% sequentially. Our capex is directed towards 5G densification, network modernization, and growing our homes and IPTV business. Our operating free cash generation, which is EBITAL minus KTEX, came in at about 830 crores. Balance sheet remains robust with a net debt extruding leases at about 960 crores. A net debt extruding leases to EBITAL ratio improving to 0.2. That was the brief update of Q1. I would now hand over to Vaidehi for the questions. Over to you, Vaidehi.

Thank you, Swamin. With this, we will now begin the Q&A interactive session. Due to time constraints, we would request if you could limit the number of questions to two per participant to enable more participation. Interested participants, please may click on Raise Hand option on the ZOOP application to join the Q&A queue. With this, the first question comes from Mr. Vivekanand Subaraman. Mr. Subaraman, you may please unmute your side, introduce yourself, and ask your question now.

Yeah, hi, this is Vivekanand from Ambit. Further building on Gopal's commentary with respect to the relevant FWA or FTTH homes market being 400 cities, how many cities fall in the circles of Bharti Hexacom and what is the kind of opportunity in terms of absolute number of homes that you see in Hexacom? That's the first one. The second one, Airtel seems to be stepping up its capex in areas like data centers, which isn't available, which is an opportunity that is unavailable for BHL. So are there any areas where you think you can reinvest capital so that you can achieve improved revenue growth versus the industry more from a strategic three, four year standpoint? Thank you very much.

Thank you. How many cities of that, 400 cities, are in these two circles? We can get back to you on that. My sense it would be close to about 15 or 17 of them. But what is important is to understand the demographics of these two circles. North East is a circle which is large and a difficult terrain. Rajasthan, which is a little more developed than some parts of North East, possibly, is also a difficult terrain. So, reaching through a combination of wireless and wired line is a very good strategy for these two circles, as opposed to a much more developed circle like, let's say, Maharashtra of Tamil. So, we will be a little more nuanced in these two circles as far as the places where we need to go. For example, you know, a place like Chiron, which is a part of our portfolio, is an extremely developed and it represents all the attributes of aspirational population, reasonable demographic profile, and so on and so forth. So you have to nuance it in that way. Coming to your question of KDEX, I think 5G densification is a big objective that is there. Fiberization continues to remain a big job to be done. So my sense is, yes, we do not have the large B2B play which the parent entity has in terms of cloud or, more importantly, data center. But I think data center is a separate entity. It's just that it gets consolidated in overall India. Data center also does not apply to the telco organization. So that's a different entity, a different requirement. Like it was mentioned in the previous column, whatever is the ask of the business to maintain a healthy, competitive, and profitable growth, that will be attended to. As of now, we seem to be in a very comfortable position in terms of net debt to EBITDA. We'd like to be there, but if there is a call, we will certainly spend adequate money to drive competitive and profitable.

Sure. Thanks, Shomain, for your answers. Just one follow-up. Is the competitive landscape as fears in Rajasthan and Northeast, especially when it comes to user acquisition for the homes business,

So, to give you a sense, in Rajasthan, it is extremely competitive. First of all, you know, we have a listed entity, which is why we are having this conversation. The way you look at this business is there are national players who operate in this 22 telecom circles. So, there is no difference unless a particular operator decides strategically that a circle is not so relevant. That is not the case. So, the competitive intensity is as much in these circles as it is in any other circle. Having said that, I think in Northeast, we have a very, very comfortable position in terms of competitivity being placed well. Rajasthan is a far more competitively heated market. But if you talk about intensity in the ground on customer acquisition, on delivering very high quality network experience, it is no different from any other circle. It's just that the terrains are a little different, so the solutions are a little unique, especially in North East.

All right. Thank you very much for the detailed answers. All the very best.

Thank you.

The next question comes from Mr. Rishabh Dhancholia. Mr. Dhancholia, you may please unmute your side, introduce yourself, and ask your question now.

Hey, hi. This is Rishabh Dhancholia from HSBC. Thanks to the management for the opportunity. Firstly, on the mobile side, the mobile subscriber net ad trends have been relatively weaker this quarter when you compare to historical trends of the company, and also the sequential growth witnessed in pan-India ITL numbers. I wanted to understand what drove the same, and is there something circa-specific that's laid out this quarter? And also, just a follow-up on the home broadband, given the changes in acquisition policy and the rising chipsets, has management relatively revised its mid-term outlook on the home broadband segment growth internally? Any revisions in the internal targets? Thank you.

Thanks, Vishal. Vishal, on the mobile, I think if you look sequentially over the last, I don't know, maybe 16, 20 quarters, you would see a certain seasonality in customer additions, both in the industry as well as in each operating company. So I think we will leave at that. We see a higher trend of customer additions towards the second half of the year, which has been a demonstrated pattern over the years. Let me focus a little bit more on your home broadband question. See, home broadband continues to remain a very large opportunity, and there is no relenting on trying to seize that opportunity. As was mentioned in the previous call, there are two technologies, and we are giving a whole broadband Wi-Fi experience to the customer. We have found out that there are some reasons why we have to become more tighter in the quality of acquisition. So what you see in this quarter is an effect of a correction in the way we acquire customers. There is no fundamental change, either in the assumption of how big is the market, two, how we need to gain share, and three, how we need to price our offerings and give convert solutions. Either it is home broadband with content, or it is fixed and mobile convergence. So, underlying nothing absolutely has changed. You see a change in this quarter, and as mentioned, you will again see unwinding of this change because we've already moved into this. This was the quarter that the change happened, and hence it shows in the numbers. But I must also listen to add, there are also a lot of positive trends that we have seen. For example, the postcard penetration has been very low in this quarter. I'm coming from the point of view of quality customers. Post-paid penetration hasn't been very good, and we are seeing, though small numbers, but we are seeing a steady growth in the number of post-paid customers getting added quarter on quarter. So, the fundamental underlying principle of whether it is quality customers, whether it is how do we scope out the home market and how do we perceive that, nothing underlying has undergone a change. It's just a bit of change in the go-to market because of the quality of acquisition.

Thank you.

The next question comes from Mr. Aditya Bansal. Mr. Bansal, you may please unmute your side. Introduce yourself and ask your question now.

Thanks, everyone. This is Aditya Bansal from Multithouse. Thanks for taking my question. Our first question is around the higher diesel prices. For XMOM, we are seeing actually the energy costs are actually lower on the YY basis. Can you help us understand, like, what led to this? Is there some timing difference? Or, like, there are certain efficiencies that have been there in the system?

I'll hand you over to Kartik to answer that.

Hi, Aditya. Primarily, one is about the seasonal impact, which solar-based towers are giving us some benefit, and there are also some one-offs in the quarter.

So, on a trend basis, it's more or less trending in the same direction. And there's no diving lag as such, because diesel prices have won a party for the quarter.

No. The diesel jams, you know, it's not the full quarter, it's part of the quarter and so on and so forth. And you don't empty your tanks completely. So, you do have some stops of diesels lying in the digi sets, which run for some time. I don't think we have seen the full impact of diesel in the quarter, but as Karthik mentioned, the seasonality allows for more solar energy generation, and we have ramped up our solar sites, which has helped a bit. But underlying sequential trend is more or less planned.

Second one is more of a qualification. Just wanted to check if your home broadband edition number that you report, does it also include the IPTV editions in Hexacom? And if yes, can you provide the underlying trend there? Is it similar to Agile?

Yeah, so, you know, the home broadband that we sell, there are two kinds of offerings. There is one which is including content, and we also have an offering which is excluding content. So, based on whatever is bought, because there is no separate segment of digital TV in this company, so everything is bundled into home broadband. But the customer is not counted twice. Shavu?

In terms of the trends, so we have seen like a Hexacom share in the overall home development for rental. That has increased. So, whether the calibration that we have done on FWA, does it apply also to Hexacom or it has been at a lower pattern? Because there still will be trends in terms of Hexacom on the additions there. Thank you.

Thanks, Lord, Shumin. Thank you. Thank you.

The next question comes from Sanjais Jain. Mr. Jain, you may please unmute your side, introduce yourself, and ask your question now.

Thanks, Shumin, for taking my question. A question on the depreciation, there is a sharp jump sequentially, 4.9% quarter on quarter. Any particular reason for that staff increase in the depreciation? That's number one. Number two, on the EBIT margin for the home segment that tends to be negative or immaterial, when should we see revenue translating into a profit growth in the home segment for Hexacom?

Well, thanks, Sanjeev. The depreciation that you see a little higher is, first of all, There is one day extra. So you see a little more. Also, you know, the IPTV rollout has led to some increase in depreciation of Exapont. Coming to EBIT margin, see, whenever we start a CPE-based business, until we reach a critical mass, there are certain costs which do not get leveraged. I cannot give you a number as to when or a forecast as to when it will become positive, but you can rest assured that the unit economics is no different. It is just that once you get into a reasonable size and scale, this will naturally turn positive. It is a small number, so it does not disturb the overall trajectory of Texacom, which is a good thing. We are able to build the category without impacting the overall profitability of the entity. Underline unit economics is the same as any other player.

Just to add on to that, if we pay fibre rental and hence the profitability in home service for Exacom will always be slightly inferior to Bharti et al, which count it as asset and we count it as an operating cost. Is that the right understanding?

Well, it is a reasonably right understanding, but at the EBIT level, you know, you have depreciation of the fiber also coming in. So, I think if you look at EBIT, it is not very different from one of the others.

That's clear. Thanks, Somin. Thanks for answering all those questions and best of luck for the coming process. Thank you, Sanjeev.

Thank you, everyone. Now, I would like Somin to give his closing remarks for Bharti Hexacom.

Thanks a lot for all of you for joining the call for Q1. We are a good quarter. Look forward to meeting you again for the Q2 results. Thank you.

Thank you, everyone, for joining us today. Recording of this webinar will be available on our company website. Thank you and have a great day ahead. Bye.