Airtel 5G rollout: Plans to complete rollout this year at a cost of about ₹28,500 cr

Bharti Airtel expects to complete 5G rollout in urban areas and some key rural pockets this year and expects the investment in networks to hover around ₹28,500 crore. Bharti Airtel Managing Director Gopal Vittal during the company's earning call said that the company's decision to not bid for premium 700 megahertz band spectrum and go for non-standalone 5G network is leading to better coverage at lower cost.

'We are already in 3,500 cities and towns out of around 7,000 cities. we will conclude urban coverage this year and some of the key rural pockets,' Vittal said.

He said that the company has stopped making capacity expansion in 4G network as the company is seeing traffic offload of up to 30% in areas where 5G has been launched.

'I think the quarter's capex of ₹9,000 crore is little elevated, but if you take two full years, the capex is about ₹28,500 crores for the full year. As I mentioned before, if you take a three-year view, we will be broadly in that same ballpark of what we normally do'.

'And we have reason to believe that the full-year capex for 2023-24, will be in the same broad ballpark as what we have the current year,' Vittal said.

The company's capital expenditure in India more than doubled to ₹8,989.4 crore in the March 2023 quarter from ₹4,276.7 crore a year ago.

The majority of the capex of ₹6,647 crore was deployed in the mobile business as the company continues to build up a pan-India 5G network.

The annual revenue of the mobile services business in India grew by 21% to ₹75,924.6 crore in FY2023 from ₹62,915.1 crore in FY'22.

For the year ended on March 31, 2023, Bharti Airtel's net profit almost doubled to ₹8,346 crore from ₹4,255 crore a year ago.

The consolidated revenue from operations of Bharti Airtel for 2022-23 increased by 19.3% to ₹1,39,144.8 crore from ₹1,16,546.9 crore at the end of 2021-22