Bharti Airtel is India's second largest mobile network operator and one of the largest telecom companies in the world by subscribers. It was built by Sunil Bharti Mittal out of a business that assembled push button telephones in the 1980s, then won a Delhi mobile licence in 1992. Today it sells mobile, broadband, direct to home television and enterprise services in India, runs Airtel Africa across 14 countries, and holds a stake in BT Group of Britain.
Last edited 15 October 202631 revisions16 sourcesReading time 26 min
Timeline
1984Sunil Bharti Mittal begins assembling push button telephones in India from kits imported from a Singapore partner, and Bharti Telecom Limited is incorporated.the tie-up was with Siemens AG of Germany
1992Bharti bids successfully for one of the four mobile phone network licences auctioned in India.the Delhi licence required telecom operating experience, so a deal was struck with the French group Vivendi
1994The government approves the plan, clearing the way for commercial mobile services.
1995Mobile services launch in Delhi under the brand name AirTel, through Bharti Cellular Limited.
1998Bharti becomes the first telecom company in India to cross the 2 million mobile subscriber mark.the company also cut STD and ISD cellular rates under the brand India One
1999Bharti Enterprises acquires control of JT Holdings and extends cellular operations to Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh.
2000Bharti acquires control of Skycell Communications in Chennai.
2001Bharti acquires control of Spice Cell in Kolkata.
2002Bharti Enterprises goes public, listing on the Bombay Stock Exchange and the National Stock Exchange.
2003The cellular operations are brought under a single Airtel brand.
2004Bharti acquires control of Hexacom and enters Rajasthan, and launches Hello Tunes, the first caller ring back tone service in India.
2005The network is extended to the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, completing nationwide voice coverage.
2006Talks to buy the South African operator MTN Group collapse after the two sides cannot agree on control.
Airtel-Vodafone launches mobile services in Jersey and Guernsey in the Channel Islands.
2009Airtel launches its first international mobile network in Sri Lanka, and a second round of MTN talks ends without agreement.
2010Bharti completes the 10.7 billion dollar purchase of Zain's African mobile operations across 15 countries.the largest acquisition by an Indian telecom firm at the time
2010Bharti buys a 70.9 per cent stake in Warid Telecom of Bangladesh for about 300 million dollars and 100 per cent of Telecom Seychelles for about 62 million dollars.
2010Airtel rebrands globally on 18 November, with a new lower case logo and a new version of its signature tune.
2011Bharti signs a five year managed services agreement with Ericsson for its African networks.
2012Bharti agrees to buy 60 per cent of Wireless Business Services, a Qualcomm joint venture holding 4G spectrum, for about 9.07 billion rupees.
2013Bharti acquires the remaining equity in Wireless Business Services and makes it a wholly owned subsidiary.
2015Bharti buys Augere Wireless Broadband India, which held 4G spectrum in the Chhattisgarh and Madhya Pradesh circle.
2017Bharti agrees to buy Telenor India, acquires Tikona Infinet's 4G spectrum, buys Millicom's Rwandan business Tigo Rwanda, and signs a deal to take over the consumer mobile business of Tata Teleservices.
2019The consumer mobile business of Tata Teleservices is merged into Bharti Airtel on 1 July, adding spectrum and subscribers.
2021The company takes strategic stakes in early stage businesses through its Airtel Startup Accelerator programme.
2022Airtel begins rolling out 5G services in India and acquires a strategic stake in the blockchain media technology firm Aqilliz.
2024Bharti signs a multi billion dollar network deal with Ericsson, completes India's first 5G Cloud-RAN trial with Nokia, agrees to buy a 24.5 per cent stake in Britain's BT Group through Bharti Global, and shuts down Wynk Music.
2025Airtel signs a strategic agreement with SpaceX's Starlink to explore satellite based internet services in India.the arrangement is subject to regulatory approval
What it does
Bharti Airtel is an Indian multinational telecommunications company headquartered in New Delhi. It operates in about 18 countries across the Indian subcontinent, Africa and the Channel Islands, and in India it sells mobile telephony on 5G and 4G networks, fixed line broadband and voice services, with the exact mix of services varying by country.[1]
The company is the second largest mobile network operator in India after Reliance Jio, and at its peak scale it has been described as the second largest mobile network operator in the world by number of subscribers.[1] Its business is built out of four revenue streams. Mobile services in India and Africa are the largest, enterprise and wholesale connectivity is the steadiest, home broadband and direct to home television are the smallest but the stickiest, and digital services and payments are the ones the company is investing in for the future.[1]
Airtel's competitive position rests on two things that are hard to copy. The first is spectrum and network coverage: it holds airwaves across the bands used for 4G and 5G and has deployed Voice over LTE across Indian telecom circles, which lets voice calls run over the data network.[1] The second is distribution. Airtel's retail and enterprise channels reach into small towns and villages, and that network is what it now plans to use to sell satellite internet and other new services once regulators allow them.[1]
History
The company's origin is a trading business rather than a telephone company. In 1984 Sunil Mittal started assembling push button telephones in India from kits he had earlier imported from a Singaporean company, replacing the bulky rotary phones then in use, and Bharti Telecom Limited was incorporated with a technical tie-up with Siemens AG of Germany for manufacturing electronic push button phones.[1][14] By the early 1990s Bharti was making fax machines, cordless phones and other telecom equipment, and Mittal had named his first push button telephone Mitbrau.[1]
In 1992 Bharti won one of the four mobile network licences auctioned in India. The Delhi licence required the bidder to have telecom operating experience, so Mittal struck a partnership with the French group Vivendi to qualify, and the government approved the plan in 1994.[1] Mobile services launched in Delhi in 1995 through Bharti Cellular Limited under the brand name AirTel, and within a few years Bharti was the first telecom company in India to cross two million mobile subscribers.[1]
The next decade was spent assembling a national footprint licence by licence. Bharti acquired control of JT Holdings in 1999 to enter Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh, Skycell Communications in Chennai in 2000, Spice Cell in Kolkata in 2001 and Hexacom in 2004 to enter Rajasthan, and it extended its network to the Andaman and Nicobar Islands in 2005.[1] The company listed on the Bombay and National stock exchanges in 2002, and in 2003 the separate cellular operations were brought under one Airtel brand.[1]
Going abroad was the following chapter. Airtel launched its first international network in Sri Lanka in 2009, and in June 2010 it completed the 10.7 billion dollar purchase of Zain's African mobile operations across 15 countries, the largest overseas acquisition by an Indian telecom firm at that point.[1][6] In the same year it bought a majority stake in Warid Telecom of Bangladesh and all of Telecom Seychelles, and on 18 November 2010 it rebranded globally with a new lower case logo designed by a London agency and a new version of its signature tune.[1][3][5]
The years after 2016 were shaped by the arrival of Reliance Jio and the price war that followed. Airtel bought Telenor India, Tikona's 4G spectrum, Millicom's Rwandan business and eventually the consumer mobile business of Tata Teleservices, absorbing spectrum and customers while the industry consolidated.[1][7] In 2022 it began rolling out 5G, and in 2024 and 2025 it signed network modernisation deals with Ericsson and Nokia, agreed to buy 24.5 per cent of Britain's BT Group, and tied up with SpaceX's Starlink to explore satellite internet in India.[1]
Mobile services in India
Mobile telephony is the company's core business and its largest source of revenue. Airtel sells prepaid and postpaid plans across every Indian telecom circle, using 5G, 4G and LTE Advanced technologies, and it says its network reach covers the great majority of the country's population.[1] For most of the period since 2016 the Indian mobile market has been a three way contest between Airtel, Reliance Jio and Vodafone Idea, with the first two investing heavily in 5G and the third constrained by debt.[1]
The economics of Indian mobile are driven by two numbers: the number of subscribers and the average revenue per user. India's tariffs are among the lowest in the world, which means profitability comes from scale and from persuading customers to move to higher priced plans rather than from raising headline prices.[1] Airtel has pursued this by pushing postpaid bundles, family plans and data plus entertainment packages, and by selling the same customer a broadband connection and a television subscription.[1]
The customer base has grown through a mix of organic additions and acquisitions. When the consumer mobile business of Tata Teleservices merged into Airtel on 1 July 2019, the company added about 13 million subscribers and 178.5 MHz of spectrum in three bands widely used for 4G.[1] The Telenor India deal, completed in 2018, brought customers and 43.4 MHz of spectrum in the 1800 MHz band across seven circles, and was structured as a no cash deal whose real cost was spectrum licence payments of about 1,600 crore rupees over ten years.[1]
Airtel has also been the operator most willing to experiment with services bundled into the mobile plan. It launched Hello Tunes, the caller ring back tone service, in July 2004 and was the first operator in India to do so, and it later bundled music, video and television into higher priced plans.[1][5] Its signature tune, composed by A. R. Rahman, became one of the most downloaded pieces of mobile music in the world, with more than 150 million downloads.[1]
Broadband, fixed line and digital television
Airtel's home services business sells broadband internet through fibre, DSL, internet leased lines and MPLS, along with IPTV and fixed line telephone service. Until 18 September 2004 the fixed line and broadband business ran under the Touchtel brand, after which everything was consolidated under the Airtel name.[1] As of June 2019 Airtel provided these services in 99 cities and had about 2.342 million broadband subscribers.[1]
The direct to home television business, Airtel digital TV, began on 9 October 2008 and had about 16.027 million subscribers as of June 2019.[1] Airtel merged its telemedia business with its mobile and direct to home operations in 2011, a decision the company described as making it easier to sell a single relationship to a household rather than three separate products.[1][2] The merger of the mobile, DTH and telemedia businesses was reported at the time as affecting about 2,000 jobs.[2]
Home broadband has become more important to the company as mobile subscriber additions have slowed. A fibre connection to a household produces a higher and more stable monthly payment than a prepaid mobile connection and it creates a reason for the customer to stay, because switching means replacing physical infrastructure. Airtel has therefore been expanding its fibre reach into smaller cities, where the competing option is often a local cable operator rather than another telecom company.[1]
Airtel Business and enterprise services
Airtel Business sells connectivity and communication services to companies and government departments. The portfolio includes data centre links, cloud connectivity, international long distance, MPLS networks, security services and internet of things connections, and it is sold to banks, manufacturers, technology firms and public sector organisations.[1] Enterprise revenue is less visible than consumer mobile but it is steadier, because corporate contracts run for years and are far less sensitive to price wars.[1]
The 2024 agreement with Google Cloud, under which Airtel agreed to work with Google on cloud adoption and generative AI solutions for Indian businesses, is part of the company's attempt to sell more than connectivity to its enterprise customers.[1] Airtel has also built its own cloud and security products for the Indian market through Airtel Digital, which runs a business cloud, security and communication platform offering sold to companies rather than consumers.[1]
Wholesale is the quiet half of the enterprise business. Airtel sells capacity on its undersea cables, landing stations and domestic fibre to other telecom companies and to global carriers, including the two international consortia whose cables reach India. That traffic is priced in dollars and is one of the reasons a fall in the rupee helps the company's reported revenue.[1]
Airtel Digital and consumer platforms
Airtel Digital Limited is the subsidiary that holds the company's digital products, including Airtel Xstream, the Airtel Thanks customer platform, the Mitra payments platform, Airtel Ads, Airtel IQ and Airtel Cloud.[1] The idea behind the unit is that a telecom company owns a customer relationship that can carry more than a phone bill, and that services attached to that relationship cost less to sell than services sold independently.[1]
Wynk Music was the best known of these products. Launched on 1 September 2014 by Airtel Digital, it was a music streaming and distribution service in 14 languages, available in India, Sri Lanka and 15 African countries, and it ran a programme that helped independent artists release music with distribution support and payment for every stream.[1] It was initially available only to Airtel subscribers and was opened to everyone in 2017, and it offered Dolby Atmos audio through a partnership with Dolby Laboratories.[1]
In late August 2024 Airtel decided to partner with Apple to offer Apple Music to its customers instead, and Wynk Music was shut down in December 2024, with its staff moving into the telecom division.[1] The decision is a useful illustration of how telecom companies now treat content: owning a music service is expensive, and licensing someone else's is cheaper than running your own, so the platform is bundled rather than built.[1]
Airtel Payments Bank and financial services
Airtel Payments Bank was launched in January 2017, and it is the company's route into banking for customers who do not have a full service bank account.[1][13] The bank operates through the same retail distribution as the mobile business, which lets Airtel open accounts in places where a branch bank would not be profitable, and it earns money on deposits, payments and remittances rather than on lending, because a payments bank licence does not permit lending.[13]
The business ran into trouble over how accounts were opened. In December 2017 the Unique Identification Authority of India suspended the eKYC licence of Bharti Airtel and Airtel Payments Bank for verifying Aadhaar details, after customers complained that accounts had been opened without their consent and that some had received their cooking gas subsidies into those accounts.[1] The suspension was a serious setback because eKYC was the technology that made instant account opening possible, and it took the company months to restore the licence and its reputation with the regulator.[1]
Financial services remain a small part of Airtel's revenue but a strategically important one, because payments and, in future, credit and insurance give the company a second way to earn from a customer it already serves. Airtel also holds the Mitra payments platform inside Airtel Digital, which is used to run payments and rewards for merchants and for Airtel's own customers.[1]
Airtel Africa
Airtel Africa is the group's subsidiary for the African continent and provides mobile telephony and mobile money services in 14 countries, mainly in East, Central and West Africa.[1][12] The business began with the 2010 purchase of the Zain mobile operations across 15 countries, and Nigeria is its most profitable market, helped by cheap data plans and a large young population.[12] As of March 2019 Airtel had more than 99 million subscribers on the continent, and the subsidiary is listed on the London Stock Exchange and is a constituent of the FTSE 250 index.[1][12]
The African business is different from the Indian one in one important respect: mobile money. In countries where a large share of adults have no bank account, a phone linked wallet becomes the way people store money, send it home and pay for goods, and the fees on those transactions are a bigger part of revenue than they are in India.[12] That is why Airtel Africa reports mobile money users separately from voice and data customers.[12]
The footprint has also been reshaped by exits and mergers. Airtel sold its operations in Burkina Faso and Sierra Leone to Orange in a deal completed on 19 July 2016, merged its Tigo business in Ghana into a joint venture named AirtelTigo in 2017, and in October 2020 said it planned to exit Ghana by selling its shares in AirtelTigo to the government of Ghana.[1][12] Its Rwandan business, acquired from Millicom in 2017 for an estimated 60 to 70 million dollars, operated as Airtel-Tigo until it was rebranded Airtel Rwanda in January 2020.[1]
South Asia and other markets
Outside India and Africa, Airtel operates in Sri Lanka and holds a stake in a Bangladeshi operator. Bharti Airtel Lanka began commercial services on 13 January 2009, under a licence granted in 2007 and registered with the Board of Investment of Sri Lanka, and it sells voice, voicemail, data and GSM services under the Airtel brand.[1] Dialog Axiata of Sri Lanka is a separate investment of the group rather than a controlled subsidiary.[1]
In Bangladesh the company's history is one of entry and then dilution. Warid Telecom launched commercial services on 10 May 2007, and an Abu Dhabi consortium sold a 70 per cent stake to Bharti Airtel for about 300 million dollars, with the regulator approving the deal on 4 January 2010.[1] The company was rebranded to airtel from 20 December 2010, the remaining 30 per cent was sold to a Bharti holding company in March 2013, and in November 2016 Airtel Bangladesh was merged into Robi Axiata. Robi is now a joint venture in which Axiata of Malaysia holds the controlling stake and Bharti Airtel holds a minority, and Robi is the licensee of the Airtel brand in Bangladesh.[1]
The Channel Islands business is small but old. Jersey Airtel and Guernsey Airtel, both wholly owned subsidiaries of the Bharti group, announced on 1 May 2007 that they would launch mobile services under the brand name Airtel-Vodafone after an agreement with Vodafone, and the business operates a 4G network in both islands.[1] The company also runs the One Network service, which lets Airtel customers in a group of countries pay their home rates while roaming, including for incoming calls, a feature aimed at the migrant workers who move between India, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and the group's African markets.[1]
Spectrum, 4G and 5G networks
Spectrum is the raw material of a telecom business and Airtel's holdings have been assembled over more than two decades of auctions and acquisitions. The company holds airwaves in bands including 850 MHz, 900 MHz, 1800 MHz, 2100 MHz, 2300 MHz and the 3.5 GHz band used for 5G, and it has bought spectrum both in government auctions and by acquiring companies that held it, such as Wireless Business Services, Augere and Tikona.[1] Buying a company with spectrum has often been cheaper than winning it at auction.[1]
The 4G build out was completed through a mix of new purchases and the Tata Teleservices merger, which added 178.5 MHz of spectrum in the 1800 MHz, 2100 MHz and 850 MHz bands, all widely used for 4G.[1] The company has deployed Voice over LTE across Indian telecom circles, which carries voice calls as data over the 4G network and allows the older 2G and 3G airwaves to be reused or switched off.[1]
The 5G phase has been a contest of network quality rather than coverage alone. In July 2024 Airtel and Nokia completed India's first non-standalone 5G Cloud-RAN trial over the air using commercial spectrum in the 3.5 GHz and 2.1 GHz bands, reaching throughput above 1.2 gigabits per second, and in December 2024 the company signed a multi billion dollar deal with Ericsson to deploy centralised and Open-RAN-ready solutions and upgrade its 4G and 5G radios.[1] The March 2025 agreement with SpaceX's Starlink is the next frontier, aimed at connecting places that terrestrial networks cannot reach economically, and it remains subject to Indian regulatory approval.[1]
Revenue and financials
Bharti Airtel reports revenue from four main streams: mobile services in India, mobile and mobile money services in Africa, enterprise and wholesale connectivity, and home services such as broadband and digital television.[1] The Indian business dominates the total, and the company reports its accounts in rupees while a large share of its international and wholesale revenue is earned in dollars.[1]
The effect of currency on reported results is visible in the company's own history. In the quarter ended March 2010, the first full quarter after the Zain Africa acquisition, revenue rose 53 per cent to about 3.2 billion dollars and the newly acquired African business contributed about 911 million dollars to that total.[1] In the same quarter net profit fell 41 per cent, from about 470 million dollars to about 291 million dollars, because radio spectrum charges in India rose by about 188 million dollars and interest on the debt taken for the acquisition rose by about 106 million dollars.[1]
The company's scale today is much larger. Revenue was reported at about 1.52 lakh crore rupees for the year ended March 2025, and the India mobile customer base has been reported at over 400 million users, with average revenue per user in the region of 200 rupees a month.[1] The group's worldwide subscriber count was about 496.91 million as of June 2022, counting mobile subscribers in 17 countries together with Indian telemedia and digital services subscribers.[1]
Cash flow is the number that matters most in telecom, because networks consume enormous amounts of capital and the debt taken to build them has to be serviced out of operations. Airtel's ability to keep spending on 5G while reducing leverage is the central question every quarter, and it is why the company has sold minority stakes in its digital units and listed Airtel Africa separately, bringing in cash without giving up control.[1][12]
Shareholding and ownership
Bharti Airtel is controlled through Bharti Telecom, the group's holding company, in which Bharti Enterprises and Singtel of Singapore are the two shareholders. Bharti Enterprises holds about 50.56 per cent of Bharti Telecom and Singtel holds about 49.44 per cent, and Bharti Telecom in turn holds about 35.80 per cent of Bharti Airtel.[1][15] That structure lets the founding family control a listed company while a strategic foreign partner holds a large minority of the holding company.[15]
Singtel's presence is more than financial. The Singapore group has been a partner since the earliest days of the mobile business and has held board representation, and its own position on telecom regulation, including its views on network neutrality, has at times been read as aligned with Airtel's.[1] Singtel is also a major shareholder in Airtel's competitors in other Asian markets, which makes the relationship a strategic alliance rather than a simple investment.[1]
The listed entities are layered. Bharti Airtel Limited is listed in India, Airtel Africa plc is listed in London with its own minority shareholders, and the company's digital and payments subsidiaries have taken in external investors.[1][12] The company has used these separate listings to raise money at valuations that reflect each business rather than the group as a whole.[1]
Employees and offices
Bharti Airtel employs about 30,000 people directly, a number much smaller than its subscriber base because telecom is capital intensive rather than labour intensive.[1] Most of the physical work of running a network, including tower maintenance, field operations and some customer service, is outsourced to specialist companies, a model Airtel adopted early when it signed managed services agreements with vendors such as Ericsson, Nokia and Alcatel-Lucent.[1][4]
Managing the network through vendors rather than employees is what allows an operator to cover a country the size of India without a proportionate payroll. Ericsson has managed and optimised Airtel's mobile networks in Africa under a five year agreement signed in 2011, modernising base stations and providing network planning and deployment, and it has been the managed services and technology partner in Asian operations as well.[1][4] Alcatel-Lucent was awarded a three year contract in 2009 to set up an internet protocol access network across India for the fixed line business.[1]
The corporate headquarters is in New Delhi, at Nelson Mandela Road in Vasant Kunj, and the company has regional offices across the Indian circles it operates in as well as offices in the countries where Airtel Africa and the South Asian businesses operate.[1] The company also runs large customer service and network operations centres in India, several of which serve its African operations as well as the domestic one.[1]
Acquisitions and joint ventures
Airtel's growth has come as much from buying operators as from building networks. The largest purchase was the 2010 acquisition of Zain's African mobile operations across 15 countries for 10.7 billion dollars, which made it the world's fifth largest wireless carrier by subscribers at the time and instantly created Airtel Africa.[1][6] In the same year it bought 70.9 per cent of Warid Telecom in Bangladesh for about 300 million dollars and all of Telecom Seychelles for about 62 million dollars.[1][3]
The domestic consolidation came later and in pieces. Airtel agreed to buy Telenor India's assets and customers in seven circles along with 43.4 MHz of 1800 MHz spectrum, a no cash deal whose cost was spectrum licence payments of about 1,600 crore rupees over ten years.[1] It bought Tikona Infinet's 4G spectrum for about 1,600 crore rupees along with 350 cellular sites, and it bought Augere Wireless Broadband for its spectrum in the Chhattisgarh and Madhya Pradesh circle.[1]
The Tata Teleservices deal was the biggest of the domestic purchases. Announced in October 2017 as a debt free and cash free transaction, it transferred the consumer mobile businesses of Tata Teleservices and Tata Teleservices Maharashtra to Airtel, which took on unpaid spectrum liabilities rather than paying cash.[1] The Competition Commission of India approved it in November 2017, shareholders approved it in August 2018, the National Company Law Tribunal cleared it in January 2019, and the business merged into Airtel on 1 July 2019, bringing about 178.5 MHz of spectrum and about 13 million subscribers.[1]
Not every deal completed. In 2014 Bharti agreed to acquire Loop Mobile for about 7 billion rupees and the transaction was called off later.[1][7] The company's joint ventures include Airtel-Vodafone in the Channel Islands with Vodafone, the managed services agreements with Ericsson, Nokia and Alcatel-Lucent, the strategic stake in the blockchain media technology firm Aqilliz taken in 2022 through the Airtel Startup Accelerator, the agreement with Google Cloud in 2024, and the Starlink arrangement with SpaceX in 2025.[1]
Competition
In India Airtel's principal competitor is Reliance Jio, the mobile arm of Reliance Industries, which entered the market in 2016 with free introductory services and forced tariffs down across the industry.[1][16] Jio and Airtel are the two operators with the scale to fund nationwide 5G rollouts, and their competition now turns on network quality, bundling and the speed with which they can move customers onto higher priced plans.[1][16] Vodafone Idea is the third large operator and has been constrained by debt and government dues, which has made the market effectively a two horse race at the top.[1]
Outside mobile, Airtel competes with different sets of firms in each business. In home broadband its rivals include Reliance Jio's fibre service and the local cable and internet service providers who dominate many neighbourhoods; in direct to home television its rivals are Tata Play, Dish TV and streaming services; in enterprise connectivity it competes with Jio, Tata Communications and the global carriers.[1]
In Africa the picture is different. Airtel Africa competes mainly with MTN, the South African operator it twice tried to merge with, along with Orange, Vodacom and local operators country by country, and the battle is fought over network coverage in rural areas and the adoption of mobile money.[1][12] The failed MTN talks in 2006 and 2009 matter because MTN had more subscribers and broader coverage at the time, and the two companies have been rivals in Africa ever since.[1]
The newest competitive threat comes from outside telecom. Satellite internet services such as Starlink and Amazon's Kuiper promise to serve places where laying fibre is uneconomic, and Airtel's response has been to partner with Starlink rather than oppose it, positioning itself as the distribution channel for satellite connectivity in India.[1]
Controversies and criticism
The company's most persistent controversy is about network neutrality. In February 2014 the chief executive of Airtel's India operations said that messaging services such as Skype, Line and WhatsApp should be regulated in the same way as telecom operators, and in December 2014 Airtel changed its terms so that voice over internet calls were excluded from the free data in 2G and 3G packs, charging 4 paise per 10 KB on 3G and 10 paise per 10 KB on 2G for such calls.[1] After widespread criticism the company reversed the change on 29 December 2014, saying it would wait for the regulator's consultation.[1]
The Airtel Zero scheme drew a stronger reaction. Announced in April 2015, it allowed app firms to pay so that their applications would be free for Airtel customers, which critics said created a two tier internet.[1][8] When reports said the e-commerce firm Flipkart had joined the scheme, users began leaving one star ratings on the Airtel app on Google Play, and Flipkart announced that it was walking away from discussions about the platform.[1][8] In October 2016 the telecom regulator recommended a combined penalty of 3,050 crore rupees on Vodafone, Bharti Airtel and Idea Cellular for denying interconnection to Reliance Jio, a recommendation the operators disputed.[1]
Privacy and security have produced two separate episodes. In June 2015 a code used by the company was accused of compromising subscribers' privacy, and in December 2017 the Unique Identification Authority of India suspended the eKYC licence of Bharti Airtel and Airtel Payments Bank after customers complained that accounts had been opened without consent.[1][9] In December 2019 a security researcher found a flaw in Airtel's mobile app API that could have exposed a subscriber's name, gender, email, date of birth, address, subscription details and IMEI number to anyone who knew how to query it; the company acknowledged the issue and fixed it, but the episode was reported as affecting the personal information of up to 32 crore subscribers.[1][10][11]
The company has also been criticised over the ordinary economics of prepaid telecom in India: the expiry of data packs, charges that are easy for customers to miss, and the treatment of subscribers during the period when Jio's free services forced every operator to cut prices.[1] These are commercial disputes rather than legal findings, but they are the reason consumer groups watch telecom pricing closely.[1]
Reading the numbers
The first number to look at in an Airtel result is average revenue per user in India, not the subscriber count. India already has more connections than people in many circles, so adding subscribers proves little, while a rise in average revenue tells you the company is selling more to the customers it has, which is where the profit is.[1] The company reports this figure every quarter, and it moves slowly.[1]
The second is capital expenditure against operating cash flow. A telecom company must keep buying spectrum and upgrading radios, and a quarter in which capital spending exceeds operating cash flow is a quarter in which the company is borrowing to grow. Watching that gap over several years tells you whether the 5G investment is being funded by the business or by lenders and shareholders.[1]
The third is the split between India and Africa. Airtel Africa earns a large part of its revenue in mobile money fees, which behave like a payment business rather than a telecom one, and it is priced and listed separately in London.[1][12] Reading a consolidated figure without separating the two hides which business is actually improving.[12]
The fourth is the effect of currency. Because international long distance, wholesale and African revenue are earned in foreign currencies, a weaker rupee raises reported rupee revenue without any additional traffic. The operating numbers, subscriber additions, average revenue and mobile money volumes, are the honest measure of whether the quarter was good.[1]
