Is the worst over for telecom? For Airtel?<\/b>
For Airtel, certainly yes. The reset of the industry<\/a> has only strengthened Airtel in a big way. Perhaps, some people may have underestimated its inner strength. The muscles Airtel had developed leading this industry have come with a very heavy emphasis on investing in our networks, IT technology coupled with extreme customer focus.
How important is market leadership?<\/b>
I'm not saying it for the sake of saying, but for us, being number one is very important. However, the definition of number one varies. Being number one in the minds of customers is most important. I think that is our input, output could be being the number 1 or two in the market share. I say that as a founder of this company as a person who has led the telecom revolution in the private sector from day one. This is non-negotiable for us.
Our focus is on customer care, service, quality of the service, network, digital services and not on giving out deals which may determine the outcome of the number of customers on our network.
You trail Jio<\/a> in revenue market share (RMS) by 6-7% percentage points, as per Trai…<\/b>
No, it's not that much. It is more like 2-3% point, as per our published data. Our data set is based on very stringent norms. If a customer hasn’t used our service for 30 days, we don't count him\/her as a customer. And that's why our VLR is at 96-97%.
What is Airtel’s revenue market share as per your estimates?<\/b>
Vodafone results are still not out, but we should be closer to 35%.
What is your RMS target for the next few years?<\/b>
It is a good place to be in at 35%, when you are three private operators and BSNL. Will we improve the share? Yes…But the math is stacked against fast increase in market share from here. With a 10% annual growth rate, one needs to get about 60% of the new adds to increase your market share by one percentage point.
What was your capital expenditure in the last five years?<\/b>
It is about Rs20,000 crore a year. Give or take another Rs500 crore. Without spectrum costs.
And do you expect the pace to continue?<\/b>
Yes. We plan to build more than 20,000-30,000 cell sites this year, more fibre & FTTH roll out. Some more investments on the DTH (direct-to-home) side and into building data centers…then, the cycle will start for 5G.
Airtel wanted to retain only spectrum related debt and retire the rest….<\/b>
Yes, but as we start to get the debt down, some new obligation such as AGR payments, new spectrum auctions come in. Airtel has raised about $12 billion in the last two and a half years but most of it has gone to AGR payments, spectrum instalments and debt. The bank bank debt however, is about Rs 5000-Rs6000 crores…we can actually clean up the bank debt in the next few months.
Is that a realistic aim for you?<\/b>
The cash flows that have been generated now show that it is a possibility that we will be ending up paying the banks faster or we can keep the banks and pay the DoT faster. DoT is more expensive, the 2010 auctions are at 10% interest rate, bank debt is at 7%.
There is an issue with the bank guarantees as well…<\/b>
Bank guarantee is something which the DoT must reconsider because those are from historical times. Now that you have exposure of tens of thousands of crores of spectrum payments to these operators without any such instruments, why bother about these small bank guarantees. Secondly, RBI norms mandate provisioning of that much capital allocation, thus reducing the capital pool, and the cost of bank guarantee has quadrupled.
Last two years you raised $12 billion, any figures for the next two years?<\/b>
We are in a reasonably good shape for now. No plan as such to raise more capital.
Not planning to raise funds even by sale of assets?<\/b>
Possibly yes. Invit is becoming a very popular medium for monetizing assets, yet keeping operational control. There are large assets sitting in towers - 42% is worth some Rs25,000 crores; also a large amount of fiber, could be worth tens of thousands of crores. Data centre was partially sold. We have minority assets like in Bangladesh which is a billion dollars. So, there are opportunities of divestment, should the need arise.
Is there a talk to restructure your digital assets in a way that will enable you to monetize them a lot more freely?<\/b>
Yeah. There is something called Airtel Digital now, under which all the digital entities are being housed. There is a discussion going on how to restructure that part. Around 119 million active monthly users are sitting here.
So will your restructuring be on the lines of Jio Platforms<\/a>?<\/b>
Not exactly the same…So in Jio<\/a>, you get a piece of what is on top (Jio Platforms<\/a>) and thus, also a piece of Jio.
But here it could be sitting alongside. What we are thinking about is a step-up company, which will then be the holding company of Airtel and Digital…Digital could become parallel (to Airtel)…the thinking is to restructure it so that we have similar outcomes (on potential monetization).
So, potentially you can have two monetizable vehicles?<\/b>
Yes. The advantage you have in a separate digital story is that if he (investor) only wants to come there (digital) and not in telecom, that can be done.
Will this step-up company have to mirror the Airtel shareholding?<\/b>
Everybody will have the same economic interest.
If I am an Airtel shareholder, will I get a stake in the step-up company?<\/b>
Has to be. Whatever (entity) comes out, anybody who owns Airtel today, because everything belongs to Airtel, will have to belong to all.
What is your vision behind this restructuring?<\/b>
It is really important that when you're giving digital services to the customers they don't have any kind of regulatory overhang of the telecom service, because that's not a regulated industry.
So this could also be an offshoot of the AGR judgment?<\/b>
Yeah possibly, but the final result could be: you have a listed company and you can bring a listing here too after two-three years.
Airtel will continue to be listed?<\/b>
It is a $45 billion company, can’t take it private.
So do investments in Jio Platforms by Google<\/a> and Facebook mean they can’t invest in your companies?<\/b>
Google<\/a> works very closely with us and Facebook has done a number of deals recently. Whether they want to invest in us is up to them.
In fact, it was an odd move for OTT (Google and Facebook) companies to be part of a telecom company (Jio).
Did you hold discussions with Amazon or other strategic investors in the past and is there any possibility of one coming in, in the next 6-12 months?<\/b>
We haven’t had any such conversations. We have not reached out for investments.
What is your vision for Airtel for the next five years?<\/b>
Very clearly, Airtel has pivoted today to the technology company. But we are still not going to start competing with the OTT platforms, we are going for the partnership model while developing products. IQ & Safepay are fully Indian homegrown solutions. These are the small innovations that you do on top of, what you call the dumb pipe, so that you are actually having a very smart ecosystem.
So are you taking in learnings from Jio?<\/b>
No, I would say the ecosystem has changed.
What have they (Jio) done, differently from us? Jio Chat, Jio Magazines, Jio Music, each one of those, there are equivalent things that have been sitting on our side.
We are B2B2C. And, frankly speaking, globally, telco’s have not been able to make B2C successful.