Airtel Plans Rs 1.17-Lakh Cr Investment Over 4 Years – Economic Times

Agencies

New Delhi: Bharti Airtel plans to spend 1.17 lakh crore in capex and related expenses through subsidiaries — Indus Towers, Nxtra and Bharti Hexacom — over the next four years.

Airtel will also hold an extraordinary general meeting (EGM) on February 26 to seek shareholder approval for issuing shares to Google following the US-based tech giant’s purchase of a 1.28% stake in the telco for about 7,500 crore, it said in a regulatory filing on Saturday.

Out of the total proposed capex, Airtel will spend 88,000 crore in business with mobile tower company Indus Towers, 15,000 crore for availing services of data centre firm Nxtra and transactions of up to 14,000 crore with Bharti Hexacom, according to the filing.

Given the 5G developments globally, it is likely that 5G will soon start to become a reality in India, it said.

Therefore, considering the increased requirements of passive infrastructure during massive 5G rollouts, “the company proposes a higher amount of transactions of up to 20,000 crore per annum with Indus Towers for FY2025-26. For the preceding years, it will be spending 17,000 annually,” Airtel said.

The filing comes within a week of Google announcing an investment of up to $1 billion in Airtel as the two companies explore ways to get more Indians online and look to cooperate on 5G use cases specific to the South Asian nation besides delivering enterprise services.

Airtel is the second telco after Reliance Jio Infocomm (Jio) to receive funding from Google. The search services leader needs more and more people on the internet, which India with 1.3 billion people offers, while telcos like Airtel and Jio need more Indians to use smartphones to drive up data usage and revenue, experts said.

Besides, the funds will help Airtel, India’s second largest telecom carrier, as it prepares for 5G auctions slated for mid-2022 and subsequent network rollouts, they said.

Google will invest $700 million (5,224.4 crore) from its $10 billion ‘Google for India Digitization Fund’ to buy a 1.28% stake in Airtel through a preferential issue of shares at 734 a unit. The remaining $300 million will be used over the next five years for multiple commercial agreements, such as Airtel’s plans to make smartphones more affordable to help around 350 million users of feature phones upgrade to devices that support online access.

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