According to Gopal Vittal, managing director, Bharti Airtel, tariff repair needs to happen across the industry with participation from all telecom operators. Airtel is looking to raise telecom tariff at the right time in the future.
Speaking during the company’s recent earnings call, Vittal noted that Airtel will invest in areas where it has weak market share and will roll out 25,000 new sites. Meanwhile, the telco has stopped all investments in 4G, and the entire capacity enhancement is now only happening in 5G services.
He added that Airtel will continue to allocate capital toward transport network infrastructure, enterprise and data centre business and home broadband. Further, the telco’s capital allocation on the wireless radio front will moderate in this fiscal given it has already deployed significant 5G network across the country.
In addition, Vittal noted that tariff repair is needed for return ratios to improve and it does not matter from which technology the ratios improve.
He further added that Airtel is looking for potential acquisitions in the business-to-business (B2B) space to grow its enterprise business and is looking to strike deep strategic alliances with top companies. Furthermore, he noted that for the B2B business, the market is large, and adjacencies are driving a bulk of the growth.
