Bharti Hexacom Ltd (NSE: BHARTIHEXA) Q4 2025 Earnings Call dated May. 14, 2025
Corporate Participants:
Unidentified Speaker
Gopal Vittal — Managing Director and Chief Executive Officer
Shashwat Sharma — Chief Operating Officer
Akhil Gupta — Vice Chairman
Naval Seth — Head of Investor Relations
Harjeet Kohli — Chief Financial Officer
Soumen Ray — Non-Executive Director and Chief Financial Officer
Analysts:
Unidentified Participant
Mr. Piyush Chaudhary — Analyst
Gaurav Malhotra — Analyst
Ankur Rudra — Analyst
Sanjesh Jain — Analyst
Vivekanand Subbaraman — Analyst
Kunal Vora — Analyst
Ali Asgar Shakir — Analyst
Presentation:
operator
Bharti Airtel Limited and Bharti Hexacom Limited Fourth quarter ended 31 March 2025 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 certain forward looking statements that must be viewed in conjunction with the risks that we face. Post the Management Opening Remarks we will open up for an interactive Q and A session. Interested participants may click on Raise hand option on your Zoom application to join the Q and A queue. The participants may click this option during the Management Opening Remarks itself to ensure that they find a place in the queue.
Upon announcement of name participants to kindly click on Unmute myself in the pop up screen and start asking the question post Introduction with this I would now like to hand over to Mr. Gopal Vittal for his opening remarks.
Gopal Vittal — Managing Director and Chief Executive Officer
Thank you Vaide A very warm welcome to the earnings call for quarter 4 25 with me and on the call I have Shashwat, Shman, Harjeet, Naval and Akhil. I will focus on our fourth quarter as well as our full year performance today along with an update on our strategic priorities. But before I switch and get on to our performance, let me start with the esg. We’re advancing our ESG agenda with consistent progress. Recent initiatives include a collaboration with Nokia on green 5G, the use of AI ML to improve energy efficiency of our radio network. Nextstra is the first data center in India also to deploy AI for next gen facilities, increasing the asset life and reducing non IT power consumption by 10% each.
We have now solarized more than 30,708 sites. Let me now turn to our financial performance and I’ll do a quick roundup on FY25. We delivered another year of strong performance. Consolidated revenues came in under a lakh and 73,000 crores. This was impacted by Africa currency devaluation during most of the year. The silver lining of course was a steadying Naira. As we ended the year EBITDA after Lee’s FLO and lease obligations recorded a growth of 21.2% with a continued margin improvement of about 2.3%. India revenue and Ebitdal excluding Indus Towers grew by 15.3% and 20.2% respectively.
Ebitdal margin at 48% expanded by around 2% despite absorbing the full 5G cost and continued network expansion. India capex for the year was about 30,270 crores. This was lower than 2024 as we had guided operating free cash flow which is really EBITDAL minus CAPEX was solid at just under 31,400 crores. Disciplined capital spending operational excellence has strengthened our balance sheet. In the last two years we prepaid the entire high cost DOT debt from past spectrum auctions. This was totaling to about 42,000 crores. And India net debt to Ebitdal now stands at 1.5. Our focus strategy and our sharp execution is driving performance across our businesses.
On mobility, it was yet another year of share gain across every circle. Every circle gained share. Broadband growth has gained momentum and at the same time I still believe we need to raise our game even further. We’ve now launched IPTV which will further enhance our customer experience. Drive convergence has also lower our CapEx spend on the box. Network expansion was as planned with 19,858 network sites and about 44,400 kilometers of fiber that we deploy. Fiber deployment as I mentioned remains a strategic priority. With accelerated rollouts and almost nearly 7.2 million home passes added. Fixed wireless access was launched in over two and a half thousand cities.
Let me now turn to the Q4 performance. Consolidated revenues came in at 47,876 crores and this was impacted by a decline in our B2B segment which was in line with what we had guided last quarter to focus on quality revenues. India revenues excluding Indus came in at 33,100 crores. EBITDAL margins came in at 50.7%. This is an improvement of 1.4%. We prepaid another tranche of high cost DoD spectrum debt of 5,985 crores. Let me now share a quick update on each of our segments in the mobile business. We added 5 million customers to our revenue earning base and 6.6 million smartphone data customers.
Postpaid net adds has remained steady at 0.6 million. ARPU was at 245. That was flat sequentially. But remember it was impacted by two less days in the quarter on an equal day basis. Therefore arpu stood at rupees are 248. I do want to underscore that the key ARPU drivers which are feature phone to smartphone upgradation, prepaid to postpaid upgradation, data monetization and international roaming penetration still remain intact. We are on track with our 5G expansion. Having added about 25,000 new sites in the full year FY25 we closed the quarter with 135 million 5G customers. 5G devices now represent 85% of the total smartphone shipments and we continue to capture our fair share of the 5G device market.
In the broadband segment, we added 8.1 lakh customers and rolled out over 2 million FTTH home passes. We further strengthened our content offering by signing an exclusive partnership in India to offer Apple TV and Apple Music to both our Wi Fi as well as postpaid customers during the quarter. We also signed an agreement with SpaceX to bring Starlink’s high speed Internet to our customers where they’re not able to access terrestrial networks. Starlink will therefore complement and enhance Airtel’s suite of products to provide ubiquitous connectivity across the country to our customers. On digital TV. We added 76,000 customers during the quarter, largely aided by our IPTV launch.
Despite DTH industry headwinds, we’ve achieved a record high in market share. We’re also making structural changes to our DTH business by completely eliminating subsidies and we believe this will dramatically impact our cash flows. Our IPTV launch has seen encouraging response from customers. IPTV as you know delivers enhanced convenience with a better user experience, flexibility to watch on demand as well as catch up content in addition to linear broadcast content. Airtel Business reported a revenue of 5316 crores. As mentioned in the last call, the sequential decline is on account of our strategy to move away from commoditized low margin businesses.
The underlying business continues to see traction and has seen some step up in performance in this quarter. During the quarter we also landed two subsea cables, SeeMeev 6 and 2 Africa Pearls, strengthening our global connectivity offering. On the digital businesses, we continue to add muscle to our digital portfolio with cloud which we’ve launched just now, Cybersecurity, financial services, IoT and CPaaS and all of these are getting additional investments. Airtel Finance is growing fast and our new partnership with Bajaj Finance will further bolster our portfolio on the Payments bank. Our monthly transacting users now stood at just under 100 million.
They’re at 96 million growing 10% sequentially. The annualized revenue run rate stands at 2,900 crores which has grown by 35% year on year. Deposits remain strong at over 3,600 crores growing 30% year on year. A quick update on Africa the underlying constant currency revenue growth was strong at 3.5% sequentially with stabilization on the Naira Reported revenue growth came in at 6.3% sequentially. Ebitdal was 4,085 crores with a margin of 35.9%. The balance sheet for Airtel Africa remains solid with net debt to EBITDAL of 0.9. Let me now comment on each of our areas of focus.
We continue to build a diversified and resilient portfolio. The underlying performance across the portfolio remains strong. Africa now accounts for 24% of revenues, India Mobile is at 56% and India Non Mobile and Indus is at 14 and 7% respectively. Our investments are directed towards future proofing Airtel and reshaping our portfolio to drive growth across segments. The second area of focus is is to win quality customers. Let me start with broadband. We see strong tailwinds led by growing penetration for smart TVs and changing content consumption habits. We estimate the industry brace to grow from 80 to up to 80 to 90 million homes from the current level of 46 million.
To capitalize on this growing opportunity, we are focusing on three areas. First, we’re expanding our market presence with continued rollout of fiber home passes and offering fixed wireless access in newer PIN codes where we’ve not been able to get fiber in over the past three years. We’ve extended our fiber network across 629 cities and are deepening our coverage to accelerate share gain. We’re adding over 1.7 million fiber home passes per quarter with a plan to increase this further. Second, we continuously enhance the value we deliver by offering compelling content bundles and driving convergence. As I mentioned, we’ve strengthened our broadband offer through exclusive partnership with Apple TV and Apple Music.
This combined with Extreme’s 22 OTT apps that we’ve aggregated into the platform gives us a competitive edge. The third area of focus is channel expansion. As I mentioned last quarter, this was a top priority for us. Today I would say all our channels now sell all our services and this is continuing to accelerate our growth. This integrated approach will help us expand our footprint and drive momentum in the broadband segment. Let me now turn to mobile. As I mentioned earlier, India mobile tariff continues to remain one of the lowest globally and needs further repair. We’ve also said that the current telecom tariff structure in India is broken with a one size fits all pricing model which is not appropriate for upgradation nor is it in line with any other market restructuring.
The tariff architecture is essential to improve financial health of the industry and sustain future investments. This could simply mean reducing data allowances on some of the packs and charging more for those who can afford to pay. The other area of focus on mobile continues to be postpaid smartphone upgrades. Upgrades is a second area of focus and driving penetration of international roaming is a third area of focus. While our rural rollout has driven our market share gain trajectory. We still have an opportunity, I believe to sweat all our assets. We do not believe that the rollout in coming year will be accelerated.
This rollout will substantially lower as we’ve completed our footprint today. Let me now turn to B2B. The B2B market is evolving rapidly and provides strong opportunities for growth. Connectivity is growing at a modest pace while adjacencies are growing at a much faster clip, contributing almost 90% of of overall industry growth. We’re focusing on three areas here. First, to build the right mix of services to sharpen our offerings over time. Customer needs have shifted to a solution approach and we are well positioned to address these competitively with our comprehensive suite of products that includes cloud, cybersecurity, managed services, CPAAS and IoT.
Cloud is a critical need for all customers and we’re addressing this with our telco grade cloud. It’s really a fully sovereign and regulated offer built with the best technology. It optimizes the total cost of ownership, provides telco grade reliability to our customers and is built on our own learnings of running one of India’s largest private cloud. This is a cloud on which every one of our applications run. We’ve now done roundtables across the country and we are taking this to market in the month of June. The second focus area is on customer experience and delivery assurance.
We’re investing in flapless, low latency networks in key locations, upgrading the existing infrastructure and deploying advanced digital tools to ensure more reliable and predictable service delivery. To further enhance network resilience, we’re also investing in OPGW fiber infrastructure. In addition, data centers continue to be a strategic part of our enterprise offer and we’re scaling up investments to meet the growing demand. The third focus area is to build world class account management and leveraging digital tools to drive productivity. Offering the right solution, superior customer experience and on time delivery we believe will drive a higher share of customer wallet.
For us, the third pillar of our strategy is the obsession to deliver brilliant customer experience. We’ve doubled down on our efforts to enhance our network experience through increased use of digital tools. Over the last few quarters we rolled out a 1km by 1km network grid view. This basically means that the country is divided into a million grids and this is now delivering encouraging results to reduce churn across key markets. We’ve now taken this one step further and have honed the visibility down to 100 meter by 100 meter grid. This level of granularity enables us to identify network issues more precisely and resolve them structurally.
In addition, we use AI and ML tools extensively to improve performance and drive sustainability in our network. Our industry first anti Spam tool has led to significant relief for our customers. We’ve identified over 27 and a half billion spam calls to date, translating to an impressive 1560 spam calls every second. Since its launch in September 24, Airtel customers have seen a 16% reduction in spam calls. We continue to strengthen our fight against spam and you will hear more about this in the coming days with the launch of New Futures. Deep obsession with our customers stems also from the culture that we’ve built over the years that really is predicated on ownership and an entrepreneurial spirit.
As I’ve said before, there are only two types of people at Airtel those who serve customers and those who serve those who serve customers. This is why we encourage our employees yet again this year to work for a full day alongside our frontline teams. So every one of our employees went out to the market and worked with our frontline teams. This initiative has helped generate insights ranging from network infrastructure to service delivery and assurance that are already being translated into themes for action. The fourth pillar of our strategy is to build and leverage our digital capabilities.
Over the years we’ve transformed our digital platforms and fully wired it into our ways of working. Two additional focus areas we’re working on today. First, building gold standard digital tools on top of these platforms. These tools help us simplify our ways of working, drive efficiency and enable us to identify new growth avenues. The second is the translation from the product to platform approach has given us solid results in B2C business and is now being extended into our B2B business. We’ve now started work on embedding AI at the very center of our platforms in the core of our operations.
You will hear more about this in the coming quarters. The fifth and last pillar of our strategy is War and Waste. This is central to our operations. In FY25 we saved over 2,200 crores of network opex. We believe there is always room to strip out waste in our business. To sum up overall we delivered yet another strong year of performance. The flow through of tariff repair was in line with our expectations. We continue to see strong growth opportunities in postpaid, in Broadband, in Convergence and B2B. We are well capitalized to seize these growth opportunities. Our disciplined approach with well planned and calibrated capex financial prudence and sustained deleveraging is reflected in our solid balance sheet.
I want to reiterate that our FY26 capex will be lower than FY25 as we’ve done a lot of heavy lifting over the last two years. We’ll continue to channelize our investments to future proof Airtel and build digital services at scale. Finally, I want to underscore that industry does need further tariff repair for sustained financial health and to support continued investments and deliver a respectable roce to the business. With that, let me hand back to the moderator.
Questions and Answers:
operator
Thank you very much Gopal. We will now begin the Bharti Airtel Q and A interactive session for all the participants. Please note that the Q and A session will be restricted to analysts and investor community only due to time constraints. We would request if you could limit the number of questions to two per participants to enable more participation. Interested participants may click on Raise hand option on your Zoom application to join the Q and 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 also requested to limit their questions to Bharti Airtel till 3.30pm as the management will start the Q and A discussion on Bharti Hexacom from 3:30 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.
Mr. Piyush Chaudhary
Yeah hi, good afternoon and thanks for the call. Congrats on set of numbers. This is Piyush from hsbc. Two questions. Firstly, in terms of capital allocation, would you intend to further increase stake in Edel Africa or Indus Towers and any minimum net debt to EBITDA threshold which you like to maintain and beyond which surplus capital would be used to pay a dividend. Secondly Kapal, you mentioned you know Capex will be lower in fiscal 26 but any color on how you know how much lower can it be? Will it be at the same pace as we saw in fiscal 25 and we saw in fourth quarter there was a surge in Airtel Business Capex.
Any reason for that? Thank you.
Gopal Vittal
Thanks. So let me start with your second part of your question. The increase in Airtel Business Capex was largely on account of some investment that we made on cloud. As I mentioned we’re taking this to the market in June. Plus we’ve made some investments, additional investments in our data centers but otherwise it’s business as usual. How much lower the Capex will be for next year? I’m not at a position in a position to comment in specific terms. What I can tell you is that it will certainly trend downwards. And the reason I say this is that the rural rollout will substantially slow down.
There are a few more areas, particularly in some of our challenger circles where our coverage is low. For example in MP in Maharashtra, in Gujarat we will continue to do a little bit of radio rollout there. There will be some 5G rollout transport and so their radio rollout will come come down substantially. The transport size side is a, is a consistent kind of capex that we put in and that will continue and the rest of the businesses will get their their fair share. So you will see certainly a moderation in capex on Africa. I want to give you a little bit of the background.
If you recall we were forced to sell down in the past due to cash flow issues. And the fact is Africa is growing solidly and even more than India. It’s almost a 2x in terms of growth. And you will appreciate that all companies need growth and here we’ve got one nicely set up in a large set of 14 countries. This is a big big advantage. So we will take more and back it if we believe in it. All our buying has been at good value. Our last block was at about 132pence and now it’s at 170 odd pence which gives us good foreign exchange hedge.
The asset is in pounds even though underlying currencies are volatile. But reported growth is also at 15%. It’s solid. It’s also dividend paying and therefore we will look at opportunities to buy more. Indus has no plans at this point in terms of buyback. Indus, there’s a dividend that, you know, a committee was set up to review the dividend between, sorry, review it between dividend buyback, etc. And as a significant shareholder we will certainly do the right thing. You know Airtel as you know has announced a big step up dividend and so we’ll expect this trend to continue.
So the reason I’m giving you a slightly longer answer is we want complete flexibility on the use of cash. It will always be in the best interest of the company. And as you know, you know both the promoter group and the management has so has shown solid leadership in managing difficult years of financial situation where many competitors struggle. So you’ll have to leave this to our judgment to use the way cash is deployed in the right way. We will manage this through balancing debt, dividends, buybacks and some investments wherever needed. That is something that we would like to assure you. Piyush
Mr. Piyush Chaudhary
Great Thanks Gopal. And any kind of minimum net debt to EBITDA threshold or you want complete debt over there also you have complete flexibility.
Gopal Vittal
We are continuing to deleverage here. As you’ve seen. You know, we have paid off a lot of the high cost spectrum debt. This is with a specific intention to lower the interest burden on the company. We’ll continue to look at opportunities to deliver and at the same time we’ll step up dividend as well.
Mr. Piyush Chaudhary
Thank you.
operator
The next question comes from Mr. Gaurav Malhotra. Mr. Malhotra, you may please unmute your side, introduce yourself and ask your question now.
Gaurav Malhotra
Yeah, hi, this is Gaurav Malhotra from Axis Capital. Just had three questions. Firstly, Gopal, you did mention and you know the dividend has been bumped up this year. But any, any sense on if there could be some formalization or dividend policy in terms of some percentage of net income banned or percentage of say FCF like PC for in. In other sort of players or in industries. That was first question. Secondly, if you can just give us some sense of, you know, what kind of traction you’re seeing in FW in terms of subscriber ads. And, and lastly, where are we on the transition to 5G essay? Those are my three questions.
Gopal Vittal
So Gaurav, we have, we are as we mentioned last year as well. You will see from us a step up in dividend. And that is exactly what we’ve done. We are not announcing any specific policy. In addition to that, the free cash that is actually generated within the company we will use in the best way possible through a combination of deleveraging dividends as well as additional investments wherever growth can be had on fwa on fixed wireless access. Firstly, I must tell you that the way we look at our business is we look at total homes added rather than fixed wireless access.
You know that fiber is always a superior technology when compared to fixed wireless access because it gives you concurrent uplink and downlink at the same levels. It has infinite capacities. And so one of our obsessions has been to really roll out fiber at a much more rapid pace. That said, the fact is that there are places where we’ve not been able to reach which will take time. And this is where fixed wireless access comes in. Today about 45%, 40 to 45% of our overall net adds are coming in from fixed wireless access. And this will continue to see, we believe that the overall homes business must continue to see stronger growth.
We would be disappointed IF against the 812,000 net adds that we did this quarter, we don’t see a step up in the next quarter and beyond. And therefore that’s the focus that we have. The mix of this we would ideally like it to be more and more towards fiber, but fixed wireless access is a great complement and over time fiber will chase fixed wireless access on 5G essay at the right point in time, we will go for it. We, as I’ve mentioned to you before, on the mobile side, it’s very important that we offload the 5G, the 4G traffic to 5G networks before we are in a position to reform the spectrum and move to save.
I think the important thing to look at on whether it’s SA or NSA is what’s the experience that’s being delivered. Very recently Open Signal came up with a set of awards on 5G experience across the country and we have won every single one of those awards. So I think experience matters more to us than technology. For the sake of technology, we’re going to be prudent about where we actually deploy SA based on when we can offload the traffic. As far as fixed wireless access is concerned, there’s an advantage in potentially using SA in order to improve the uplink performance.
And that’s something that we’re looking at. You must recall that, you must know that at this point our networks on 5G are pretty empty and so we have a lot of headroom for uplink. But at some point in time, probably the first port of call will be to move SA on fixed wireless access and then finally to get it to mobile.
Gaurav Malhotra
Yes, thank you for this. Just couple of follow ups. One is that why is the mobile capex then sort of moving up in this quarter? Is it just seasonality, like a year end, kind of a push or there’s something more to it?
Gopal Vittal
Yeah, I don’t think you should look too deep into it. I think you should look at it as a full year capex. Sometimes you have an up and you have a down. It could be seasonality, it could be some materials coming in. So I think the important thing to look at is on an annual basis, how does the capex trend? And there I would say that it will certainly be coming down next year.
Gaurav Malhotra
And just last question, in terms of data center, is that an opportunity which you would pursue in a more focused manner within the company?
Gopal Vittal
Yeah, that’s a great question, Gaurav. I think you’re right that we’ve been kind of, I would say modest in terms of our data center aspirations. The fact is that in a market that is growing quite rapidly and a market that is very fragmented, we are a player with potentially less than 12% market share. We’re not pleased with that. This is a business that we understand. We have deep relationships with customers here, both on the enterprise side as well as on the OTT side. And we think that we can really meaningfully step up the growth of our data center business.
There are several, several data centers that are currently in the stage of build. We’re going to have a substantial amount of capacity that will be created in the next 18 months, which is all in the stage of build. We’re also looking at certain other avenues and we hope to hear, you know, that you can hear, you’ll hear more about this in the coming months, but we believe that aspirations on data centers need to be stepped up.
Gaurav Malhotra
Thank you for this.
operator
The next question comes from Mr. Ankurudra. Mr. Rudra, you may please unmute your side, introduce yourself and ask your question now.
Ankur Rudra
Hi. Thank you. This is Ankur from JP Morgan. So, you know, again, solid execution and nice to see the dividends go up nicely. I just want to click back on the CapEx question. You did highlight how B2B went up quite a bit on the wireless side, at least for the fourth quarter. We are sort of back to where we were at a run rate for the previous year. I’m just sort of trying to make sense of this in the context of lack of meaningful increase in either base stations or towers this time. Was there investment more on the core side? Have we actually begun our SA investments? And similarly on homes, I’m guessing because your intention is to accelerate this going forward, the incremental capex is something that will probably be sticky for F26.
That’s the first question.
Gopal Vittal
No, Ankur, like I said, I think I’ve already said that I wouldn’t read too much into this because sometimes we bring in stuff to be deployed and some of it came towards the latter part of the quarter. So the overall CapEx, while quarter four did look a little higher, you have to look at it in light of what the full year CapEx was. And like I’ve said, I think CapEx will be going trending downwards in FY26 on homes, you know, we are on today constrained by the amount of, you know, our capability to roll out more fiber.
And I would like to see it actually step up a lot more. Having said that, this is not going to materially impact the overall capex profile of the company, but it will be a small amount to put in for a business that is really experiencing tremendous growth given the growing penetration and we would like to see more fiber being rolled out as we speak. So I’m not happy with the 1.7 million home passes that we did in the quarter. I would like to see it going up to well over two and a half.
Ankur Rudra
Thank you. The next question is on the free cash flow deployment you’re thinking about for next year. We’ve seen multiple places where you’ve been able to take prepay expensive debt and also buy back expensive bonds. How are you thinking about the balance sheet right now? And also if you can comment about the AGR conversion you have applied for in the context of that. Thank you.
Gopal Vittal
Yeah, I will take the, the second part of the question and then maybe hand it over to either Harjeet or Shamin for the, for the first part on the AGR conversion. I think for us it was quite simple. We think that, you know, we just wanted a non discriminatory level playing field in terms of an option to convert. Whether we will convert or not is a decision for the board to take. But the option is something that we wanted to make sure that we, we, we would, we wanted a clarification of the government whether we had the option or not.
Yeah.
Unidentified Speaker
So thanks Gopal. Maybe I can add a few points. Please feel free to chime in Ankur on the free cash flow. Of course the free cash flow profile is increasing. The benefit of that is a choice that we have to balance all the objectives. You’ve seen the stepped up dividend. It is step up with respect to what we used to do. But frankly 16 rupees is probably less than 1% yield on the stock today. And also while you see the leverage overall coming down, it is not homogeneously distributed. So Africa is low, Indus is very low.
India profile still is slightly higher at about 2.5. You may not see all of these but it’s important to see the largest block which is India. I think it’s imperative we continue to deleverage more within that too. So the homogeneous block as it is comfortably within two could also yield better choices to decide what we need to do with free cash flow in the shorter term. Deleveraging the high cost debt. You’ve rightly pointed out the high cost DoD debt has been prepaid. Perpetual bonds which were high on dollar reset prices which have been very high have been prepaid and some of those opportunities will again come by.
Also note that the next this financial year where we are in, we will also have large first time after four years moratorium some DOT installments to be paid by the industry. So we’ll match all of these objectives and at this stage don’t expect any meaningful change to how things have been.
Ankur Rudra
Thank you.
operator
The next question comes from Mr. Sanjesh Jain. Mr. Jain, you may please unmute your side, introduce yourself and ask your question now.
Sanjesh Jain
Good afternoon, this is Sanjesh Jain from ICICI Securities. I got a couple of questions, Gopal. First on the home services, understand the expansion in the FTTH and FWA content comes naturally now. But are there more opportunity beyond that smart home securities storage? Are we doing anything around peripheral to expand the addressable market within the home?
Gopal Vittal
What’s your second question, Sanjesh?
Sanjesh Jain
Second question is on the AI. You did mention that we are using lot of AI tools internally and in the previous call you mentioned that you don’t want to go follow up early on the GPU as a service. I don’t understand. When we are building such a nice portfolio of AI and we have such a strong understanding, why don’t we deploy it to be more economical on the enterprise side to go early in the GPU and develop lot more services for the third party.
Gopal Vittal
Okay, thank you. Well, you know, firstly Sanjesh, I think one of the initiatives that we launched this was about two years ago was on home surveillance and home security. So we did a tie up on cameras. These are really state of the art cameras. You can speak into the camera, they sort of do 360 degree swivels. You know, you get recordings on the cloud, you can track movements, you can set alerts on your smartphone, etc. Etc. And we were trying to bundle this along with our broadband. We launched this about two years ago. We’ve seen some modest success and one of the things that we found was that it was a very niche business.
So while the people who we did on board, which put potentially about half a million customers, were very sticky customers. But the fact is that, you know, it was very low ARPU and a huge amount of effort that was taken within the company. So we’ve decided to actually go a little slow on, on, on, on, on that side of the adjacencies. And the reason we are going a little slow is that at this point in time our single minded, dedicated focus is to capture a disproportionate share of home broadband. Because I believe there will be enough time as India evolves, as incomes rise for us to get into more and more services and adjacencies around that.
Even globally, if you look at most of these adjacencies, they’re a tiny fraction of the overall home Broadband spend. So this is an area that we are tracking very closely. We don’t want to miss the bus. Equally, we don’t want to fragment the team for chasing something that is not materially impacting for the company. On the AI question, I think internally, in addition to many of the experiments we’re running, we’re trying to embed AI at the very heart of our business. And so you’re right, we have a deeper appreciation of what this could do. I mean, I wouldn’t say we have a deep understanding because no company can claim to have a deep understanding today.
The technology is evolving so rapidly. But we have a deep appreciation and we are committed to putting this at the very center of our business. That said, if you take GPU as a service, it’s a very different business model, Sanjay, because the quality and the capacities of the chipsets, along with the cost of the chipsets, are changing so rapidly that I think there will be enough time for us to actually get in the we use some of the GPUs for ourselves. But to actually go and put in large investments without being clear about this I think is something that we said.
We don’t want to be an early mover in the space. We’d rather be a fast follower. So we’re going to watch this space and who knows, at some stage we may pick this up, but at this point we have parked it clear.
Sanjesh Jain
Gopal, thanks for that elaborate answer. But on the data center you seem to be very confident and I think there was some release that we are looking to double the data center capacity in three years. Can you elaborate on that, please?
Gopal Vittal
A lot of these capacities are coming on board right now as we speak, Sanjesh. So many of the investments that we made over the last 24 months and some of the investments we are continuing to make over the next eight to nine months, we’ll see significant capacities come on board in FY26 and FY27. In addition, we are having conversations with multiple players, very large players, to look at what more we can do to help their plans, to see how we can accelerate data centers. So I feel, and you know, I would certainly say that in a business as large as ours, to have a infrastructure play like data centers with a market share of 12% is low and we’re not happy with that.
And therefore we do believe that there’s an opportunity for us to step up the game here.
Sanjesh Jain
And any CapEx number have we disclosed for next three years for the data center business?
Gopal Vittal
No, we’ve not disclosed that. Separately but at this point in time it’s in the ballpark of what we would have spent. Maybe slightly higher, but it’s all rolled up into the overall CapEx for the company.
Sanjesh Jain
Last time I think we mentioned around 5000 crore. Was it the number we were looking to double at that point of time?
Gopal Vittal
Yeah, we are on track on that program.
Sanjesh Jain
We are on track on that program.
Gopal Vittal
Yeah, absolutely.
Sanjesh Jain
Great, great. Thanks Gopal for answering all those questions and best of luck for the coming quarters.
operator
The next question comes from Mr. Vivekanand Subbaraman . Mr. Subbaraman, you may please unmute your side, introduce yourself and ask your question now.
Vivekanand Subbaraman
Hi, this is Vivekanand Subbaraman from Ambit capital. I have two questions. So first of all, when you mentioned that capex would trend lower though in fiscal 25 year capex decline, it is still 24% of India revenue. What do you think is the right benchmark for a growth market like India where Capex stabilizes, let’s say in the next two, three years from a CapEx to revenue standpoint? That’s question one. Should I ask my second one or wait for your response?
Gopal Vittal
Yeah, please go ahead.
Vivekanand Subbaraman
Yeah. Secondly you, you usually call out your B2B revenue growth x of voice across some segments like global OTT plain vanilla connectivity and digital revenue streams. Right. Is it possible for you to give an update on that along with some trends like audible revenue market share? Thank you.
Gopal Vittal
Yeah. So on the CapEx number, I don’t want us to think, you know, about it right. Yet in terms of percentage of revenue, obviously as you know growth steps up, the percentage of revenue will step, step down. I mean that’s, that’s a, that’s a fact. You know, go back to 2019. At one stage we were at 50% of, of revenue was CapEx because at that point in time, you know, data services were almost free and the business was in, in a state of stress with the industry revenue having declined substantially. You know, if you were to have another round of tariff repair or restructure tariff architecture and see a significant jump in revenue, then obviously this will trend down very substantially lower.
In fact, if you look at most global companies which are in more developed markets, then the CapEx as a percent of revenue tends to be in the ballpark of 15 to 17%. So my hope is that we should be pushing a lot more for growth at this point. Our CapEx is really focused on doing the right things for the company and we’ll continue to do it if we have to step it up. By the way, we will, I believe that we will moderate during the course of the year, but I’m making an extreme point to say it’s important that we continue to put.
Because capex for us is our product so transport will continue to get its fair share. Radio capex will certainly come down, there’s no question about it. And radio is a large component of CapEx. Core tends to be a smaller component of CapEx. Our B2B business, we have stepped up our CapEx on areas like cloud, some parts of data centers, a few cables that came in. So, you know, all of that is rolled in into the overall capex number. When I say that it will come down for next year on B2B, you know, our business is, is a, is a mix of many parts of the portfolio.
There is a wholesale part which is largely to do with messaging and incoming voice. This part is broadly declining because of the pressure on price as well as the, the shift away from SMS to in app notifications, particularly, you know, within the platform of choice. So if there is a hyperscaler that’s got up running a platform, they prefer to do it through their own in app notifications. The second part of the B2B business is the core connectivity business where we have a lion’s share. We’ve got a 35% share that’s really grown. It’s almost added six to seven sharepoints over the last few years based on independent surveys by people like Frost and Sullivan.
And then there is data centers which is growing at a secular pace, about 12 to 14%. That business, we believe, needs to ramp up. And finally there’s a digital business which today is growing at about 25 to 30%. I am not happy with that growth. My own view is that that growth must be substantially stepped up. And this is why we are putting in the investments required on things like cloud to step the growth up. Now, the margin profile of the digital part of our portfolio will be always a little lower than the margin profile on the core side because the core side also has a lot of investment.
It’s also a product that we make ourselves. So in the cloud we have, we have our own cloud, the margins will be good, but if you look at things like security and so on and so forth, where there are lots of partners involved, the margins tend to be lower. But remember, there’s very little capex as well, so the roce tends to be very good. So I think the B2B business, as I’ve mentioned before, is a business which is a mix of different sides, different parts of it. It’s far more complex than the B2C business, which is a much simpler business because the different business models, there are different types of products and solutions.
I think for us the effort is to really grow the business. On the, you know, to your question on the order book, the order book on the core looks strong. The core connectivity, the order book on the digital side again looks strong. The order book as far as the wholesale and commodity side of it continues to be under pressure. And on the global side, when it comes to cables and things like that, that business is beginning to look slightly better than what it was last year. So on an underlying basis, if you strip out the low margin business that we have to shed, we’ve shed a substantial part of it.
There’s still a little bit more to shed next quarter. Our business, we believe, will perform better now this year than compared to last year.
Vivekanand Subbaraman
Thanks for the detailed explanation on both counts.
operator
The next question comes from Mr. Kunal Vora. Mr. Vora, you may please unmute your side, introduce yourself and ask your question now.
Kunal Vora
Yeah, thanks for the opportunity. First one is Vodafone Idea has now launched its 5G services. It’s investing in its network now. Are you seeing this, having any impact of this in the market, especially on postpaid additions? And do you think the market share gains trend which you’ve seen in recent quarters could slow down?
Gopal Vittal
You know, I don’t want to comment on what our competitors are doing. I think that the way I would see it is that, you know, as far as postpaid is concerned, We’ve added about 600,000 net ads this quarter. I see no reason why that, you know, should not actually step up because the number of high value users on our platform is still, you know, still a large number and prepaid to postpaid could be a very, very important driver of growth. I think most of these customers who we acquire come on family plans. That means a three or two or three or four members of the family and they tend to be on different operators.
And again, aggregating them onto our family plans becomes a very important driver of our growth. My own sense is that the last two quarters we’ve been trending at about 600,000 postpaid net ads. The reason has been the increase in or the repair in tariff that happened across the industry also on postpaid. And while this has now settled down, I believe that actually they should step up in the coming quarters. So my own view is that we have to stay focused on our customers. And the opportunity for growth. I think that opportunity remains intact within the country.
Kunal Vora
Okay, second one on you mentioned the DTH subsidies will be removed completely. How do you see the future of this business? Like if 80, 90 million high income household shift to home broadband IPTV, will this service lose relevance in coming years?
Gopal Vittal
Yeah, I think this is a big conundrum. I think because if you look at the DTH industry, it’s been going through its, its moment of reckoning and for many reasons. I mean it’s not just the legitimate reasons of technology disruption because those are good reasons. I mean if there’s new technology that’s coming in, whether it’s through the form of IPTV plus broadband, which means connected boxes and that puts pressure on dth, which is just the traditional sort of mode of linear television, then I think it’s a very good outcome. But the challenge in this business is less to do with just technology disruption.
It’s also more to do with what we’ve done to it. Which means, you know, the regulatory posture that today operates in this market where you’ve got, you know, assume that there are three homes living side by side next to each other, one served by dth, one served by cable and one served by broadband. Each of these homes has different regulatory constructs. So the DTH business or the DTH regulation as sort of price that is fixed, it has certain cross holding restrictions where you know, the content player can’t have also sort of investments in the distribution pipe.
The cable has a slightly different set of restrictions. And when it comes to broadband, it’s absolutely free for all. There are no regulations whatsoever. So this is the second reason that’s been actually creating the challenge. And the third reason is the advent of free Doordarshan or free DISH as you call it, which is on the Doordarshan, you know, Dish, you have very good content which if you look back in the in into history, it was Doordarshan was set up with a view to actually educate people on things like agriculture and you know, and so on and so forth.
Now it’s become good entertainment and that is available at almost no price. So these are some of the other headwinds that the industry is facing. My own view is that this, there will still be an opportunity for DTH because home broadband will not get to every single home in India. I mean there are 260, 270 million homes. There’ll be probably 150, 160 million TV homes. We are potentially talking over the next five years of broadband homes getting to maybe 75 to 80 million. So there will still be a large pool of broadband. You know, homes serve for linear broadcast television, which is where DTH will play a role.
And there’s still an opportunity to grow from cable. I think that is really how we see it. That said, I think the subsidies and all of the cost of acquisition that’s built in, into high sort of subsidies on the boxes that were sold needs to be stripped out. We have taken a brave call and we’ve done it. We’re waiting for the competition to follow and we hope sense will prevail to strip those subsidies out because there’s no point putting in subsidies in a market where, you know, the only subsidy is going in to rotate your own customer.
Kunal Vora
Understood. And just one last question. You announced second buyback in Africa and indicated your commitment. Would you look to delist the business? Any reasons to keep it listed? And also if you can talk about the partly paid and what’s the plan for that?
Gopal Vittal
No, I think that we will, you know, let’s not get ahead of ourselves. I think the important thing is to, like I said, I think, you know, it’s a terrific asset. It’s an asset in, you know, in, in pound sterling. It’s doing very well and you know, it’s a dividend paying asset. So we believe that the opportunity for us to buy back will continue and that’s why we’ve, we’ve done it. You know, your second question was on sorry, Kunal. No, we will call that only when we need it. At this point in time there is no, there’s no requirement for us to call the call the partly paid shares.
Kunal Vora
Understood. That’s it for me. Thank you.
operator
The next question comes from Ali Asgar Shakir . Mr. Shakir, you may please unmute your side, introduce yourself and ask your question now.
Ali Asgar Shakir
Yeah, thanks for the opportunity. Hi Gopal, Question, a couple of questions versus on the task architecture that you spoke about and this is something that you have been talking for quite some time now. Given that, you know, you have been leading the tariff increase charge for the industry since quite some time. Can you share your thoughts about, you know, what you think are the possible options available for you given that I understand, you know, tariff increases cannot be taken in isolation and industry has to move ahead together. So what are your thoughts over there? Do you think the next round of Terrafike can be more from, you know, a change of tariff architecture which probably could allow you to kind of, you know, keep building on this area significantly?
Gopal Vittal
You said you had two questions, you had Another one?
Ali Asgar Shakir
Yeah. The second question is again on the, you know, capital allocation. Now you did answer the areas where you would want to deploy capital. But you know, I mean if I take your consideration in terms of Africa buyback, maybe, you know, even Indus and sure, some of the other areas that you spoke about, I mean cumulatively next three years probably, you know, given the kind of cash flow we are throwing, we should easily generate probably more than about 1 lakh 50 or thousand crores of you know, cash flow hopefully. And that’s pre crash flow right after taking all the adjustments of the current level of capex that we are doing.
So that’s a lot of money. I know that we are looking to deleverage, but given that we would look to probably, you know, stay at an optimum level of leverage, are you looking at any large areas of investments, either India, outside or you know, anything that we should look. I mean even after taking all the consideration of dividend and the investments that you spoke about.
Gopal Vittal
So let me take you know, the first question on your tariff architecture. I think what options there are, I think, you know, obviously this can’t be done in isolation but just to give you a sense of how we see it, the entry level pricing on, you know, on the plans, I think those entry level pricing should potentially not go up and even if they do, they go up very, very modestly. But the next level pricing where there’s oodles of data allowance that’s, that’s put in there, that data allowance should dramatically reduce and then there should be a reason for people to upgrade to higher plans.
So you know, from small, medium large and extra large is the way that the architecture should be. To give you an example, if you look at the India price architecture and you say, you know, you index the entry price at 100 and you index the highest price, then the 100 gets to maybe 250. And that’s the overall architecture that we look at. But if you compare that with a market like Indonesia, which is a market quite similar to us in terms of its geographical spread, population density and so on and so forth, then that goes from 100 to 500.
So and this is just one example, you look at it, any market, you will see the stratification. So I think that’s really what we believe should happen, you know, for us. I think on your second question, I think yes, we will generate a lot of free cash over the course of the next few years. I think you leave it, you have to use, you’ll have to leave it to our judgment to use the cash. Right. We will manage this through a combination of deleveraging dividend, step up some buyback. You know, this could be in Indus or it could be in Africa.
It could be some other expansion on acquisition. But at this point we really do need to say that, you know, for us, we are going to be very fiscally prudent. You have to trust us on this. That’s exactly how we’ve been. But we would look to see how we can continue to grow this company and at the same time manage these conflicting pressures or these, these not conflicting pressures. All of the, all of the issues that we’ve got which is really around stepping up dividend, you know, and prudently using the cash to step up growth.
Ali Asgar Shakir
Got it. This is very useful. Thank you so much.
operator
Thank you everyone for asking your questions. I would now like to remind the participants to stay connected on the call for the next session on Bharti Hexacom at 3:34 minutes from now. I would now like to hand over to Gopal for his closing remarks on Bharti Airtel.
Gopal Vittal
Again, thank you very much for joining this call and really appreciate the, the, the questions that were that were asked. We hope we’ve been able to address most of these questions and we look forward to seeing you next quarter. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
operator
Request all participants to kindly stay connected for another three minutes to begin the Bharti Hexacom call. Thank you. Thank you everyone for your patience. We will now begin the Bharti Hexacom earnings webinar. With this I would now like to invite Soumen for his opening remarks.
Soumen Ray
Thank you Vedi and good afternoon everyone. Welcome to the Bharti Hexacom Q4FY 2025 earnings call. I have with me Akhil and Naval joining me on the call. I’ll start with our FY25 performance. We delivered solid results with yet another industry leading growth. Revenues and EBITDA growth came in at about 21% and 27% respectively. Margins expanded to 44.2%. A strong operating leverage is the reflection of our efforts on war, on waste and execution. The company further solidified and continued revenue market share improvement in both circles. Operating free cash generation, which is Ebital minus Capex was a strong 2,300 odd crores.
Balance sheet is robust with a net debt excluding leases at about 3,700 crores and a net debt to EBITDAL around 1. A quick update on the quarter’s performance. We delivered a revenue of 2,289 crores growing sequentially by about 1.7%. The smartphone customer addition was at 7.1 lakh compared to 4.5 lakh last quarter. REC based saw addition of 5.1 lakh with a churn of 1.8% compared to 1.9% in the last quarter. ARPU for the quarter was 242 rupees which was impacted by two lesser days in the quarter. EBITDA stood at 1220 crores with EBITDA margin of 46.6% which improved by about 30bps.
Net income for the quarter stood at 468 crores. Operating free cash flow I.e. eBITDAL minus capex was about 641 crores. During Q4 we prepared 858 crores of high cost dot date pertaining to the 2024 auction. This was at a coupon of about 8.65%. With this the company is left with only FY21 and FY22 spectrum teams. Before I hand over to Vaide, I would like to discuss about the proposed tower sale. As you are aware we have put the tower sale proposal to industries in abeyance as tcil, one of the public sector undertaking and a significant shareholder of Hexacom had requested the company to start a fresh process which meets the requirement of TCIL as a public sector undertaking.
We remain convinced about the business logic and merit of the proposal. However, in keeping with the highest standards of corporate governance and transparency, it has been agreed to put the current proposal in abeyance and undertake a fresh exercise in consultation with tci. The company will evaluate the future course on this transaction and we will update all stakeholders appropriately. With that I will hand over to Vaidehi to open the floor for questions.
operator
Thank you Soumel. We will now begin the Q and A interactive session. Due to time constraints we would request if you could limit the number of questions to 2 per participation them to enable more participation. Interested participants may click on raise hand option on your Zoom application to join the Q and A queue with this the first question comes from Mr. Sanjesh Jain. Mr. Jain, you may please unmute your side, introduce yourself and ask your question now.
Sanjesh Jain
Thanks. Thanks for the opportunity. Soumen I got three question first on the wireless I thought Rajasthan which is 80% of our evenue generally has a higher income incoming because of the tourists in the Q3 and Q4. While the difference in the growth was very small between us and Airtel, that seasonality is is really not showing up anything which I am missing or the seasonality is only very small to make in Delta there that’s number one. Second on the home broadband this quarter saw very strong growth of 10% sequentially. Is it that FW rollout has been more relevant for Rajasthan and Northeast Circle which has a difficult terrain and more rural location and FW become an important product there than ftth? Is that driving a higher growth? And number three on the dividend payout, I think we had a payout ratio of water on 33 34% Airtel on an adjusted basis at 35% our net debt position is much more comfortable level and we don’t have other commitment any reason for us to be conservative on the payout issues.
These are the three.
Soumen Ray
Thanks Sanjesh. I’ll take all three of them one by one. First on the first one on the in roamers and the outroamers. Well it is what it is. I don’t think there has been a significant change but what happens is as we grow share and we get a larger base, the number of people traveling do not change. So possibly as a percentage of that number it will marginally come down as long as we are growing. So so to that extent I think in these two circles, so to that extent maybe it will tend to trend a little downwards in percentage terms on homes.
Yeah you are absolutely right. FWA is a very very strong offering for us and as a matter of fact lion’s share of homes acquisition in Q4 has been with FWA and we are seeing a strong because it’s just the fact that there is no fwa. There is no wired broadband in large parts, large geographies of these two circles. So indeed when somebody with credibility with a high market share in mobility is coming up with fwa there is takers. So you are absolutely right on the dividend. I think we should not treat too much between a 33 and a 35 and all of that.
I think this company also, yes its debt is less but it does not have some of the other engines of growth which possibly Airtel has. Like what was mentioned in the Airtel call, we’ll balance between the 34 objectives and we will prudently use the cash that is generated and deploy it as and when required. As Gopal mentioned, I think the organization has shown a lot of prudence over the years in how generated cash has been deployed reduced. For example, today I mentioned to you in the starting comments that we do have 2122 spectrum. Those are at a clip of about 7.2%.
Who knows if interest rates keep Coming down, the CPI print has come very low. If interest rate indeed comes down, even the 7.2 may warrant to be repaid back. And you would remember 2022 was a mother of all auctions. There was a large procurement of 5G millimeter wave and so on and so forth. So we will use this prudently is all that I can say. And the difference that you see is really marginal.
Sanjesh Jain
Great Soumen, thanks for answering all those questions and best of luck for the coming quarter.
Soumen Ray
Thank you.
operator
Sanges the next question comes from Mr. Vivekanand Subbaraman. Mr. Subbaraman, you may please unmute your side, introduce yourself and ask your question now.
Vivekanand Subbaraman
Hi, I’m Vivekanand. From so on your incremental EBITDA market margin EBITAL margin we saw that the revenue is coming in at almost 70% margin despite 5G costs being embedded in the PNL data during the year. So without a terrify how should we think about incremental EBITDA margins? Ebitdal margins for FY26 that’s question one. Secondly, any thoughts on the CapEx trajectory three for for the two segments any any color that you can provide there. Thank you.
Soumen Ray
Thanks Vivek so the first one this has been a quarter where our OPEX has been very low and you must appreciate that there are certain costs which has a increasing trend. For example there are escalations built in which happens as and when anniversary of a tar happens. There are energy costs which keep increasing and we have our WOW project so it is there are inflationary impacts which will continue to push costs up and we’ll try to find good ways of reducing that through our program on war on waste. I would say this is not a quarter which is representative.
I think if you look at post tariff maybe Q3 Q4 that would be more representative coming to But I must at the same time tell you that you know these are very small nuances and I think increasingly we will target to improve our EBITDA margins. It was mentioned that most of the rural rollout is done so we are not doing anything major and hence there should be a trend of the EBITDA margin improving in future on CapEx. I think the CAPEX will come down like it is happening in Airtel. There is a transport job to be done but I think the transport job in these two circles is not so much so the CAPEX trajectory should see a downward move from FY25.
Vivekanand Subbaraman
Similar to Gopal. Talking about a range as far as capex to revenue is There anything you would like to indicate in terms of aspiration over time?
Soumen Ray
You’re not clear. Can you repeat the question?
Vivekanand Subbaraman
Yeah, I think Gopal was discussing a bit on the range as far as converging with the global industry on capex to revenue over time. Is, is that something that you can reach much sooner than Airtel? Any any further color that you can provide there?
Soumen Ray
Well, yes and no. I can certainly provide the color but the answer is yes and no. Our company does not have the. The high investment businesses like Nextra which is a capital intensive business. It does not own submarine cables. So to that extent the investment is a little less. But at the same time you have to appreciate that the digital businesses which can grow, which are pan India businesses, is also not operated from this. So I think it’s a mobile first and largely mobile only business with a small amount of B2B and homes growing. So the convergence of percentage of top line with the global peers because those global peers are comparable to Airtel because they all have these verticals.
Whereas Hexacom is operating on mobility. So the only way of growth is increasing number of customers or increasing RPU and of course a bit of homes expansion for sure. Homes needs fiberization and so on and so forth. So it is not strictly comparable with the global peers. However, as was mentioned directionally we will look at bringing down absolute capex without compromising any growth capex which is required to be deployed.
Vivekanand Subbaraman
Okay, very clear. Thank you so much.
Soumen Ray
Thank you.
operator
The next question comes from Gaurav Malhotra. Mr. Malhotra, you may please unmute your side, introduce yourself and ask your question now.
Gaurav Malhotra
Hi Soumen, this is Gaurav from Access Capital. And just, just one or two questions on. On premiumization, right? How. How is it, is it different versus a Bharti Airtel at a. At an aggregate level given that you know, these are relatively lower income circles.
Soumen Ray
Okay, the. The job is the same but the path that one will follow is different. The postpaid penetration in these two circles is very low. Whilst yes, the average affordability index is low. But the number of people who can afford a postpaid is not very different. And hence there is a very good job to be done in terms of postpaid penetration. FWA can become a big story in Northeast because of the high education levels and other social factors which influence primarily the lower part of Northeast. So there are different nuances. But functionally I think and you can see that when we listed the company there was a largest gap between Airtel, Arpu and Hexacom rpu.
That gap is narrowing. As I mentioned, Airtel is at about 245, we are at 242. It is also a factor of how data consumption is increasing in these circles. So I would say the premiumization job is the same. The quality customer job is the same, albeit the nuances would be a little different. For example, here the focus would be more on data top up as opposed to international roaming. So those nuances will happen. But the job of premiumization of customers absolutely is valid.
Gaurav Malhotra
Got it. Just one more question. You know, I know Gopal had alluded to the fact that, you know, you guys are still doing so 5G NSA and we’ll sort of look at transitioning to SA over time. But given that, you know, FWA seems to have a lot more salience for these two circles and for fwa, I think so end of the day SA eventually would be required. So is there a plan of accelerating the transition in Hexacom versus Airtel at a more aggregate level?
Soumen Ray
I don’t think we are looking at a target of acceleration. It’s a simple function of the capacity of our 5G infrastructure being utilized today. It is. There is adequate capacity for us to roll out more FWS. Of course, as FWA’s capacity gets choked up, they can be liberated by laying fibers because then you can do a concentrated fiber laying and wire up those homes. Alternately, you can go to Essay. I think we are some distance away and we are not in a race to meet a deadline as to when Essay is implemented. Whichever part of the country, whether it is any other circle or indeed these two circles, whichever circle, whichever comes closer there, we would do what Gopal mentioned in the Airtel call of implementing Essay.
But we are now, as of now, we are quite some distance away across the country, including the two circles in Hexacom.
Gaurav Malhotra
And this last question, you know, I’m sorry, the fiber is obviously not on, not on, not of Hexacom. Right. For these two circles, it’s all Airtel. But that fiber is residing in the Airtel business, Airtel homes or in the mobile segment. Sorry, I am asking an Airtel question here. It’s if. If it’s okay.
Soumen Ray
Yeah. So it is mostly sitting in mobile segment.
Gaurav Malhotra
Thank you so much.
operator
Thank you everyone. Now I would like Soumen to give his closing remarks for Bharti Hexacom.
Soumen Ray
Thanks a lot for joining the call. I think this is the first full year, almost full year of Bharti Hexacom remaining listed. I think it has been a stellar performance. I think whatever we had put up during our roadshows, we’ve been able to do it. The tariff repair has come in with great handy and the increase in dividend should please the stakeholders. Thanks a lot for joining and look forward to catching up next quarter. Again, thank you.
operator
Thank you everyone for joining us today. The recording of this webinar will be available on the company website. Thank you all. Have a good day and see you next quarter.