Bharti Airtel Limited (532454) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Good afternoon, and thank you for joining us on this webinar to discuss Bharti Airtel's first quarter FY '22 results. Before I hand over the call to Gopal, I want to quickly remind all the participants that we will be conducting a question-and-answer session. And participants who wish to ask a question can send us their question using the moderator chat option on the BlueJeans interface. With this, over to you, Gopal, for the opening remarks.

Thank you, Komal. Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you for joining us on this webinar to discuss Bharti Airtel's results for the quarter ended 30th June 2021. Also present with me on this webinar are Badal, Harjeet and Komal. So let me start with an update on COVID. India is now seeing a recovery from the devastating impact the second wave of COVID brought on the country and the economy. Things are slowly picking up and business is picking up -- businesses are opening up. Right through this tough period, our teams at Airtel did what was needed to serve our customers. Be that network teams, the home delivery teams, our sales teams or our digital teams, every single one of our people lived the spirit of service. And I cannot really stress how proud I am of our Airtel, each one of us at Airtel stood up to serve the nation in this hour of crisis; 3,224 of our employees were impacted by COVID up-to-date. Sadly, we lost 24 of our colleagues. While this is an irreparable loss, we've done what we can to provide support to the families of these employees through a generous insurance, jobs for their spouses and education for their children. We've also set up an extensive COVID support program to help our people in dealing with the stress caused by the pandemic. Our partnership with Apollo Hospitals has allowed our own employees, their families as well as the employees of our associates to all be vaccinated. Till date, close to 90% of our people have been vaccinated. In addition, we have helped our low-income customers tide over the impact of COVID through providing about INR 270 crores of benefits to keep them connected. Let me now briefly comment on our performance during the quarter. Our consolidated revenues for the quarter grew by 4.3% sequentially to hit INR 26,854 crores. Our EBITDA margins improved from 48.9% to 49.1% on a sequential basis. While a lot of attention is paid to our mobile business, I do want to underscore the strength of our portfolio, which is very clear in our performance this quarter. As you know, we have 3 parts to our overall portfolio. India mobile, enterprises and homes in India and Africa. Sequentially, of the INR 1,106 crores of growth that we showed at a consolidated level, India mobile accounted for 20% of this growth. The rest of the growth, which is the balance 80% came from our other businesses as well as geographies outside of India. So at a time when wireless revenue was impacted by the COVID-led lockdown and the consequent financial squeeze amongst many of our relatively lower-income customers, the rest of the portfolio delivered strongly. This really shows you the resilience and strength of our portfolio. Let me now comment briefly on each of our businesses within the portfolio, and I will start with the Homes business. During the quarter, we continued to expand our presence by rolling out an additional 1 million home passes. Our innovative partnership model with a local cable operator allowed us to extend our services to an additional 98 towns, taking our local cable operator presence now to over 300 towns, in fact, our broadband presence to over 300-plus towns. With the continued growth in demand for high-quality broadband triggered by work-from-home, online education and entertainment, the business added 285,000 customers and reached a milestone of 3.35 million broadband customers. This was despite challenges faced in the quarter due to lockdowns. With the lifting of the lockdown and the ebbing of the second COVID wave, we are seeing even stronger momentum in this business. We're also seeing the temporary disconnections made by small businesses and commercial offices being activated again. Going forward, I believe fiber-to-the-home is a very large opportunity, and we will continue to step up investments to take our network to over 2,000 towns across India and cover over 35 million home passes in the next 3 years. We have further strengthened our #2 position in the DTH industry and now have a presence in 18 million high-value homes. The ARPU for this business has remained at INR 151. I believe there are 2 opportunities to grow this business. The first is conversion from cable and the second is the move to connected boxes, which also allow us to operate as a platform of choice for driving the penetration of over-the-top services in partnership with over-the-top content providers. During the quarter, we made a representation to the government to bring DTH under the DoT, given the varying regulatory policies arising out of the different delivery modes of the very same content and services through different technologies, be it cable, satellite or fiber. We will continue to pursue this so as to bring about a more cohesive and consistent policy regime. For the Mobile business, COVID-induced lockdown saw some impact on smartphone shipments. We also saw a consolidation of spends at the lower end of the market as many customers migrated to their hometowns and villages. That said, the impact of this lockdown on our business was substantially lower than the last one. You will recall that we lost close to 3.8 million customers in quarter 1 of 2021, while we were about flat this time. And this has largely been on account of the work that's gone on behind the scenes on raising our digital capabilities. In addition, I must say that June bounced back very strongly, and the momentum into July has been sustained. Despite all the challenges, we added 5.1 million 4G customers and continue to lead the industry on ARPU at INR 146. Our revenue market shares at the end of quarter 4 at well over 35% was also at a lifetime high. I also want to underline some changes that we made to our tariffs recently. Our minimum entry plan will now start from INR 79 versus INR 49 earlier. This pack also offers more value to the customer with up to 4x more outgoing minutes of usage. On postpaid, we are moving all of our corporate entry plans to INR 299 from INR 199 while providing extra value. Our retail postpaid plans have also been further simplified. We now have just 4 plans and 1 add-on family plan. As we've always said, ARPU in India is extremely low. And at this level, our return on capital is in the low single digits. ARPU must rise first to INR 200 and eventually to INR 300. What we have done on the tariff front is a very small step in that direction, even as it plays to our strategy of focusing on quality customers. During the quarter, we've also deployed the additional mid-band spectrum in the 1,800 and 2,100 and 2,300 bands to enhance capacity and improve customer experience. One of the biggest initiatives we took was the deployment of our sub-gigahertz footprint on a pan-India basis. We're doing this by deploying new radios in 7 circles where we did not have a sub-gigahertz layer. In 4 other circles, we've upgraded our software to provide 4G services on the sub-gigahertz layer. The introduction of the sub-gigahertz layer will give us dramatically enhanced coverage of an additional 90 million people, thereby driving greater competitiveness in our mobile segment. I do want to underscore that the sub-gigahertz layer that we have introduced is the reason for the elevated CapEx in the quarter. Our overall CapEx outlook for the year remains unchanged from what we discussed last quarter. I say this because we've already made substantial investments in capacity over the last few quarters in the form of capacity addition, spectrum refarming and augmentation of transmission networks. During the quarter, we saw a traffic surge, but the good news was that the consumption pattern was flat across the day, much flatter. And you must remember that our investments in capacity are always made keeping peak usage in a day rather than average usage. So with a flatter curve, CapEx is not impacted. I now turn to Airtel business. Airtel business has consistently grown market share and outperformed its listed peers. In fact, as per Frost & Sullivan, in the enterprise data market, our share has moved to 31.4%, up from 22.4% a year ago. In the enterprise mobility market, we are undisputed leaders with 43.3% market share. In addition, we're now the leaders in IoT and indeed, in every part of the connectivity market. While COVID has seen some softening of the order book in the first 2 months of the quarter, we've recovered strongly in June and into July. For the quarter, Airtel business clocked revenues of about INR 3,790 crores, a sequential growth of 2.4% and an EBITDA margin of 38.8%. Airtel business serves over 3,600 large and 1 million plus emerging enterprises. Yet, as I have mentioned before, 20% of our customers account for 80% of revenues in every single vertical. There are many large greenfield accounts where we have very low share. And this is why I feel the opportunity in this business is really limited by our own imagination. We have 2 opportunities. The first is to go deeper, what we call farming. This is about leveraging the trust that we enjoy with our customers to offer many more solutions around cyber security, surveillance, cloud communications, cloud-based services, work-from-home solutions, et cetera. At the same time, there's a massive opportunity to also go wide, to build our presence in several customer accounts where we're either not present or have limited presence. This is what we call hunting. Our entire go-to-market has now been retooled to address both these opportunities through a combination of differential focus, sales incentives and in-sourcing of our SME sales force. All of this is being bolstered by a strong omnichannel digital capabilities from search, to discover, to purchase and finally, to experience. Our teams are now digitally enabled end-to-end so that the process of sales, training and even fulfillment is completely digitized. Having commented on each of our business segments, I want to step back today and talk about our view of the market and customer opportunity in India. Our strategy and our choices flow from this view. There are several Indias as we all know. Incomes, lifestyles, geographies all have an impact on the wide differences in the Indian opportunity. But let me give you a quick oversimplification of this market. This will help clarify the basis of our strategic choices. There are potentially 50-odd million high-value homes in India. They comprise of executives, self-employed professionals, businessmen and the like. These are customers who want to feel special. They desire a simple convenient experience, and they are really concentrated in the top 25 cities of India. Their average spend today on all telecom and entertainment services is about INR 1,500 to INR 2,000 per month, but this can grow with incomes rising -- with pricing being corrected, and they have the capacity to spend. The second broad segment comprises of almost 500 million migrants, gamers, young students, blue-collared workers, traders and farmers in rural areas. For the sake of simplicity, let's call them aspirers. These aspirers have a smartphone for whom the device is an essential part of their lives. They seek a good experience around their specific use cases and look for good value, not necessarily the lowest price. A large part of this customer base is concentrated in about 300-odd districts in India. The common characteristics of both these segments is that they switch seamlessly between channels, both online and off-line. The third segment comprises of an additional 400 million users, comprising of farmers, the elderly, housewives, rural traders, and these are largely users of feature phones today. They're looking for basic connectivity and a satisfactory experience that is hassle-free. The first 2 segments, the high-value home and the aspirers account for almost 85% to 90% of the overall customer market in -- of consumer market in telecom as a whole. This view of the market is what informs our choices and informs our strategy. We have a 4-pronged approach, as I've mentioned earlier. First is to provide a razor-sharp focus on these quality customers that give almost 85% to 90% of industry revenue. Second, a relentless obsession to deliver the best experience for them through our network and all the digital assets that we are building. Third, to leverage these digital assets as well as the partnerships we form to create new revenue streams in adjacent areas. And finally, doing this with financial discipline and sound governance. This strategy is a thread that ties all our businesses together. So let me provide a little more texture, an example on each of these areas. Let me start with quality customers. Our focus here is to strongly differentiate in a service -- our service in a way that is difficult to replicate. A few examples of this are the postpaid family plan, which has a powerful network effect, and creates barriers to exit. Almost 61% of our postpaid customers are now on the family plan with negligible churn. Another example is the integration of our Payments Bank proposition into the core of the mobile offer. Airtel Safeway (sic) [ Safe Pay ] is the most secure way to pay online. And Airtel Bank Wala SIM meets a very tangible need for the aspirers, and these are just 2 illustrations of that. The last example is our pivotal launch of Airtel Black. This is India's first truly converged solution. It is built for the high-value home, who has the option of bundling 2 or more of Airtel services, fiber, DTH or mobile together to be a part of the Airtel Black Club. This entitles the customer to 1 single bill, 1 customer care number with a dedicated team of relationship managers and priority resolution of faults and issues. All of this comes with 0 switching and installation costs, coupled with free service visits for life. The most exciting thing for us is that close to 30 million of the 50 million high-value homes that I spoke about, are already on our network, either with a postpaid, DTH or broadband connection. So this opportunity is really ours to tap into. In fact, we've seen strong traction on Airtel Black, and are already close to reaching the 700,000 mark in terms of homes. Remember, each of these homes gives an additional average revenue per account of INR 650. The second element of our strategy, which matters deeply to the quality customers we serve is to deliver a great experience. This starts with the network, which is our biggest strength. We've invested over INR 1,50,000 crores over the past 5 years across spectrum and CapEx to build a world-class network, one that delivers the best speeds, the best video experience, the lowest latency and the best gaming experience in India. Our complaints, which are a simple measure to drive the behavior of every employee in Airtel is at an all-time low. And we've built a network that's fully ready for 5G. It's a capability we've already demonstrated by conducting India's first 5G demo over a live network and are now conducting trials in multiple cities. We've made substantial investments in our transport layer over the last 5 years to be ready to deploy 5g when needed. We're also leading the ORAN initiative, the open radio access network initiative in India by partnering with the best companies, such as Intel, Qualcomm, Mavenir, Altiostar and Red Hat. In addition, we are now part of a very critical Make in India push having announced a strategic partnership with the Tata Group. Our formidable spectrum holdings, particularly in the mid-band, can be deployed for 5G over time. All of this is supported by India's largest network of data centers and large global submarine capacities. The other aspect around experience is to deliver an omnichannel model of delivery. Customers today switch seamlessly between online and off-line channels and are looking for a consistent and cohesive experience wherever they are. Our model to deliver this is to follow the customer across the flywheel of experience as we call it. This flywheel traces the customer across every part of the life cycle, search, discovery, purchase, onboard, experience and refer. Every part is being retooled by digital teams. And let me give you 1 example from Airtel Black. A customer today can order Airtel Black from the web or our app. The moment the order is placed, this goes straight to the nearest store, who confirms the time and date of the appointment. All metrics relating to this call are tracked inside Airtel IQ. Once the appointment is taken, the work order goes digitally to the nearest installer through our Airtel Work app, which tracks and provides analytics on the time taken to complete the job. It also has an inbuilt scheduling algorithm to make sure that no time is wasted between 2 tasks. This entire capability has been built by our digital teams in a totally modular way. This will allow us to expand the menu of products to meet many more needs in the homes of our customers. In addition, this capability can also be taken to our Airtel business customers to create new digital service revenues. We've already done this with Airtel IQ and we'll do the same with Airtel Work. Today, we have over 1,900 people in our digital organization, building products and services like this. Airtel's also increasingly a magnet for the best and brightest of digital talent. And this leads me to the third part of our strategy, leverage our digital assets to create new revenue streams in adjacent areas. Today, Airtel has one of the biggest digital ecosystems in India with over 190 million monthly active users across its 3 platforms, Airtel Thanks, Wynk Music and Airtel XStream. As of today, Airtel Payments Bank has a monthly transacting user base of close to 30 million users, an annualized GMV of over INR 100,000 crores and a merchant base of over 7 million. Even more importantly, Airtel Payments Bank has been fully integrated into all our digital channels, both our consumer app as well as retailer app, making us one of the few companies that can collect cash for any service at the point of sale, both online and offline. I'm also pleased that Airtel Payments Bank is now on the verge of hitting a INR 1,000 crore annualized revenue run rate and has actually broken even in the month of July. Our 4 core strengths of data, payments, distribution and network are now increasingly becoming a source of competitive advantage to build an Airtel of the future. There is Nxtra by Airtel, which is today the largest network of data center business in India. We have Airtel IoT that's now a market leader in the M2M space. We're also leveraging our digital assets to create altogether new revenue streams. There's Airtel IQ, our cloud communications suite, which now has over 120 customers fanning the biggest Internet companies, banks and more. There's Airtel SECURE both in the B2B and B2C space, that offers protection from cyber attacks and threats. This is a business that's now gaining traction. There's Airtel Ads, which rides on our vast digital assets. Today, we already have around 100 brands advertising on our platform. Finally, we have a subscription services across music and video, which are beginning to gain traction. All of these businesses in the digital area operate in a market that's over INR 50,000 crores and growing. Even more importantly, the economics of playing in these markets are very attractive since they almost come at no cost and CapEx. Over the last few quarters, we've made solid progress in driving these new revenue streams of revenues and are now in touching distance of INR 1,000 crores of annualized revenue. At the right point, we will provide more color on this segment through our disclosures. I want to end with a few words on ESG and corporate governance. The company remains aligned with the Paris climate accord, proactively implementing clean fuel-based power solutions for our towers, our data centers, our switching centers and other facilities. We've remained committed to the society, our customers and employees right through the harrowing time of the pandemic. We have continued to demonstrate the highest standards of corporate, financial and operational disclosures. Our classification of revenue and costs are in line with the best global peers. Our operational KPI definitions are the most stringent in the industry. In wireless, for example, our revenue customer -- earning customer definition takes into account actual revenue earned in the last rolling 30 days. When it comes to Airtel Payments Bank, we have further enhanced our reporting standards and now we'll be representing 2 additional numbers from this quarter. Firstly, the total users, these are those who have a bank account or wallet with us. Secondly, GMV, which is a standard definition in the industry. This is in addition to the monthly transacting users. I must also underscore that the monthly transacting users that we report are those unique users who have transacted on the platform at least once in the last 30 days. This is a more stringent definition than any other payment platform today. CRISIL, who have recently aligned us -- assigned us a GVC level 1 rating, indicating the highest levels of corporate governance practice and value creation. Lastly, on the recent AGR judgment of the Supreme Court. Our request was to permit correction of computational errors in the AGR demands by DoT. These apparent errors have a significant implication on the overall AGR demand. While we are disappointed with the recent outcome, the company has provisioned for the onerous payout and already paid over INR 18,000 crores, covering its obligations for the first few years as per the direction of the Supreme Court. On the next steps, relating to any review petition, we will be guided by legal advice and no decision has been taken on this yet. Finally, a word on our capital structure. The balance sheet continues to remain strong with healthy cash flows and a net debt to EBITDA of just about 3, position that is comfortable. The business has been generating strong cash flows for many quarters now. This has been a result of revenue growth, strong operating leverage and effective deployment of capital. Over the last few months, we've announced multiple monetizations in Africa in the form of tower sales as well as stake sales in Airtel Money. Following a $200 million investment in Airtel Money by TPG, a $100 million investment by Mastercard and the sale of tower companies in Madagascar and Malawi, we've also recently announced an additional $200 million investment from Qatar Investment Authority in the mobile business in Africa. The total proceeds of close to $1 billion from all of these transactions will be used for further deleveraging. In sum, our performance for the recent quarter has been strong because of the resilience and depth of our portfolio. In every one of our businesses, we're at a lifetime high in terms of revenue market share, the most critical barometer of our competitiveness. Our momentum going into quarter 2 has been strong. Our strategy and choices are dictated by our view of the India market opportunity. These are cohesive and simple. Even more importantly, we're building an Airtel of the future and are well positioned as we go forward. Thank you, and I will now take your questions.

[Operator Instructions] The first question that we'll be taking is from Ashwin Jain, I Pru AMS (sic) [ AMC. ] Gopal, his first question is that as an outside analyst, he sees Bharti as a leader in the postpaid and the premium segment. It is also the understanding that typically pricing leads -- increases are taken by the leader. And therefore, could you articulate why Airtel is not more aggressive on price hikes with the premium customer segment? I will ask a second question after you answer this.

So I think that's a good question. We are -- we've already done that. We have taken a pricing on postpaid in the B2B space moving up our entry plan from INR 199 to INR 299. On all other plans, we are at a very substantial premium. In fact, I would argue that our entry plan on postpaid really begins at INR 399. There are plans in the market today that some of our competitors offer in postpaid, which start at INR 199. So we are close to 2x of those plans. That's a very substantial premium already.

Right. Gopal, the second question is on the network. He would like to congratulate us on the operational excellence. And the question is that we now support 844 4G users per tower compared to about 712 users per tower a year ago. And therefore, could you talk a little bit about the operating leverage with regards to the number of towers and the data consumed per user?

Yes. I think the fact is that the overall data consumed in India is exceedingly high, simply because of the allowances that are -- that we provide at very low levels are extremely high. And this is something that we've been talking about that the ARPUs in the country are perhaps lower than where it should be to return a reasonable return on capital for our investment. The reason that our users per tower have gone up is that we have really focused a lot on this. We have a project where we actually look at every -- we'll measure the utilization of every single tower. We look at the number of users at every single tower, and our entire go-to-market is aligned to that metric. So one of the things that all our sales teams and our field force are accountable for is actually driving up utilization of what we call low utilization sites or unprofitable sites so that the average comes up. And I think this is one of the reasons that we saw a significant part of our incremental net adds in the last 12 months actually come from those sites where our utilizations were low.

Thanks, Gopal. The next question is from Kunal Vora from BNP Paribas. He wants to ask you what are your thoughts on the industry structure over the next 1 to 2 years. And is Airtel prepared for a 2-player market if the situation arises. And if it does, what would be the additional investment requirement?

So I think that this is a -- I mean, I do feel that as a country, we do need 3 players. I mean this is a large enough country with 1.3 billion people that can easily accommodate 3 players in this market. And 3 plus the government player. So there is clearly a situation of a serious financial stress in the industry. And we've seen one of the players actually saying to the government that they may not be able to pay their dues coming up in March 2022. We hope that the government does something to actually provide some relief to the industry. But even more important, I think if ARPU can go up, then the industry's repair can certainly happen. So I would love to continue to see a 3-player market. I think that would be the appropriate outcome for a country as large as India. Substantial investments have been made already by the industry. There are lots of jobs, not just direct jobs, but indirect jobs. And there are many, many parts of the ecosystem that depend on this industry for employment and livelihoods. And I think just from a national perspective, it would be right to see -- appropriate to see an industry structure with 3 players, not just survive, but thrive. And of course, the government player is always there.

Thanks, Gopal. The next set of questions is around Payments Bank from Kunal. He is saying, thank you for disclosing additional information around Payment Bank. What are the nature of transactions that we are seeing? And can you talk a little bit about the future plans that we have for Payments Bank?

So I think we've seen a strong growth in scale on our Payments Bank. As we said, we have almost 30 million users. We have several streams of revenue that come out of the Payments Bank. One is, of course, the deposits itself that are actually put in the Payments Bank, which earn a certain interest and our deposit base has been growing over the last couple of years. Also the average balances per customer has been growing. The second big revenue stream is really around remittances. Here, we are the #1 player across the country. And this is simply because of our vast customer base on the telecom side. We have a large base of customers. We understand the corridors of consumption and usage and speaking. And therefore, we are able to actually play in the remittance space in a very powerful way. And that's been a large source of GMV. The second -- the third part is really around payments to merchants. We have a large pool of merchants today, about 7 million. So increase -- we're seeing increasing growth in our merchant payments on the offline side. And finally, there is the digital side, both, again, payments to -- payments as well as remittances that emerge. The last point on Payments Bank is really around cash collection. One of the big initiatives we've also -- one of the big sources of revenue that we are driving is really around cash collection for companies that need digitization of cash at source. And we are actually identifying each of those customers and using that as another opportunity to drive revenue in GMV.

Thanks, Gopal. The next set of questions are from Sanjesh Jain of ICICI Securities. The first question that I'll ask you is on the CapEx. The CapEx for the India business has been elevated in the past 4 quarters, while our guidance was for, I would say, flattish to slight reduction in CapEx. So therefore, do we still see CapEx reduction in FY '22 versus FY '21? And could you please explain how much of this CapEx is creating capacity for 4G? And how much is going towards strengthening backhaul fiber and preparation for 5G?

Yes. I think that, Sanjesh, the CapEx that we put in this quarter, a large part of it was the massive rollout of our 900 and 850 band sub-gigahertz radios. We wanted to get that done fast because we spent a lot of money in actually buying that spectrum. And as I mentioned, we are able to add almost 90 million users -- or 90 million customers onto our coverage footprint. And so one of the reasons that you see an elevated level of CapEx in quarter 1 is really an advancement of those -- deployment of those radios that we would otherwise have done over a period of time, and we wanted to finish that up. The investments -- there are 3 parts to our investment in CapEx now. One is radios, and you will see that the incremental radio investment is now coming down, with the exception of this big chunk of sub-gigahertz radios that were bought. Because a large part of the radio is only capacity radios, and today, we have our 900 band and our 1800 band pretty much all across the country. We have a 2100 band in about maybe 60% of the country, and we have a 2300 band in about 80% of the country. So the incremental radios that are needed for covering additional, let's say, sites or additional towers is marginal at best. And therefore, the only source of radio investment is really more capacity solutions where you have very high consumption in the form of new sites. But with the spectrum purchases that we've done, we've been able to offset that. So the radio investments are continuing to now come down. Then there is the core investments which is a modest part of the overall CapEx portfolio. And there, I think, is a direct function of how your capacity grows. And the last part is on transport and backhaul. This is where a substantial amount of investment has been made over the last few years. You would see that in most companies around the world, as data grows, the best telcos in the West, for example, almost 40% of their CapEx goes on transmission and fiber CapEx. We have seen also a significant augmentation of transmission and fiber CapEx over the last few years. So I would say that all in all, it's a balanced CapEx outlook. I see no reason to change our stance on CapEx for the year. The elevated CapEx that we saw in quarter 1 was largely, as I said, on account of the sub-gigahertz rollout.

Thank you, Gopal. The next question from Sanjesh, and this is probably for Harjeet and Gopal, both of you, is that Bharti has been constantly generating FCF in the past few quarters. We have also monetized assets in Africa and shared plans to monetize assets in India, such as fiber, et cetera. But we still have a large debt pool at over INR 1,250 billion. A significant part of the debt is payable to government, that is understandable, but it is also expensive debt at 10% interest rate. So therefore, what are our plans for deleveraging, retiring the high-cost debt and use of funds from the sale of assets?

Harjeet, do you want to take that?

Sure, Gopal. Sure. So thanks, Sanjesh. Look, I think there are 2, 3 ways to look at this situation. One is the way you articulated in terms of the absolute amount. And the other, I think it's important to see in 2 context, what is the supporting base for serving this debt in terms of the overall leverage ratio. And how is that supporting base behaving in terms of its trends. So I would say, first of all, if you see even the global level, the overall debt to the EBITDA, if you annualize last quarter is just about 3 turns, which is fairly okay, specifically in the, shall I say, building CapEx phase as you're transiting from voice to data consummately. Second, the core EBITDA has been increasing. And I think given the pointers that Gopal mentioned around what is the direction of the overall mobility business in terms of tariffs, the nonmobile businesses growing at their own stable pace. New incremental pools of revenues with their associated EBITDAs flowing through. The trend and the outlook on the EBITDA is on the increase. So that's, I think, the second piece we must keep in mind. Third is, as is where is, Africa, if you see, going by the last quarter and the trends we have seen over the last 3, 4 quarters, generates at least about a $500 million or more of free cash flow. Our tower company, which is a merged Co, we have a 41.x % stake there. It is also free cash flow generative. It's a profit after tax of around INR 5,000 crores plus/minus here and there, which generates its own dividend. So there are these pools, which don't need capital, they actually release capital. Release comes via dividend and also through consolidation. And India itself is now given the -- where you can track the last quarter is free cash flow positive. It could be $1 billion plus x hundred million dollars depending upon how the coming few quarters perform on tariffs. So overall free cash flow generative, debt to come down, EBITDA to go up, current net debt to EBITDA is fairly stable and manageable. There is fundamentally no need to really deleverage strongly. And to mention, bulk of the deleverage has happened towards bank debt. We are virtually near 0 bank debt as we speak, where we are today. Post the quarter, some more repayments was done to the banks. So we have what is left is on as lease obligations, EoT debt, and keeping Africa side, very marginal small bank debt in our subsidiaries, whether it's Telesonic, whether it is DTH and Hexacom, et cetera. So those small pools apart, really, we have repaid bulk to all of the bank debt and left with third bucket of market debt, which is dollar bonds and some domestic bonds. From a perspective of monetization, this is not needed, thereby for deleveraging, but those opportunities continue to exist. And I think there are 3 or 4 pools, you know it better. Africa continues to be listed. Clearly, it's value is underrated. We can't be at a multiple of 6 or 7 in Africa. You see the EV EBITDA multiple is fairly low. But that pool is available. It is Listco. It is independent. We will see what and when without losing any control, there is opportunity to chip off. We have a minority stake in Robi in Bangladesh. That, by the way, is listed now for close to 8, 9 months. It is trading today probably at about $800-odd million in terms of value of the stock that we have, which is roughly 28%. No plans to seek control, do anything major there. So for us, it's a liquid opportunity. The third place is tower companies. If you recall, while in November, December, we accreted more share. But fundamentally, it's an independent towerco, and that's a pool which is available for us to think through whenever we need to. And not even talking about the fiber InvIT and/or other whether it is Homes business or Airtel Payments Bank, over time, will need to find their right discipline and scale at which they are monetizable. So these pools are available to be played for the way the business would want to play the strategy, not necessarily to monetize from our perspective, but these remain available. So within that context, slightly longish; net debt-to-EBITDA is stable, improving; trend-wise, EBITDA is growing fast; free cash flow generative independent segments; monetizable pools, which are available more or less in near liquid form and over time new building monetization pools, whether be it fiber or some of the other new subsidiaries for Airtel.

Thanks, Harjeet. I'll take 2 related questions, 1 from Rohit Chordia. He's asking that do we feel we could have waited a little bit more when we were looking at diluting the stake in the Africa Mobile commerce business because valuations seem low compared to some of the global transactions in this space. Another question relating to the balance sheet is, would we look at acquiring some more stake now in this towers given the recent share price moves?

Maybe the first one, the answer is, look, there is always an art in terms of timing, some of these things. But it was important to see that a small, roughly 10% EBITDA pool of Airtel Africa is now getting valued at 15 multiple. Could we have gotten 18, could we have waited a bit for more scale to get a better multiple? The answer is yes. And this is only a minority chip off between the 2 where the closing has been done, PPG and Mastercard. The strike dilution will be about 10.5-odd percent. So it's not necessarily a large dilution. It gives us a benchmark. That benchmark is significantly higher in terms of EBITDA multiple that the entire Airtel Africa stock is trading at. So it allows us to be able to play the Airtel Africa story also fairly well because the elimination has to happen. And since the time we have signed each of the 2 quarters, we've grown fantastically well in Airtel Money. So I would say timing is an art, but it's for small stake dilutions. It's better to create good benchmarks and write that up. On Indus Towers, frankly, the last time also, the positioning, which we probably communicated back to you was driven out of what our belief is, which is the value for the asset and our expectation of the dividend flows coming back. If you recall last time, we spent about INR 2,900-odd crores to acquire close to 5% in one go and within about 90 days, we got INR 2,000 crores of dividend back from the entire stock. So if there are opportunities, we'll be probably assessing it, but is there a strategy? Is there a drive to be able to do that tomorrow morning? Absolutely no.

Thanks, Harjeet. Gopal, the next set of questions are from Ankur Rudra of JPMorgan. He's saying it's great to see Airtel take the initiative in changing the floor plans on 2G prepaid and corporate postpaid because these segments don't see competition from all the players. But could you share the thought process behind the timing? Why now rather than earlier? And should we expect more proactive action on reshaping the pricing paradigm or removing the floor plans in the 4G prepaid side?