Dear Shareholders,
The financial year 2025-26 has been another year of strong execution and progress for Airtel. The demand for digital services continues to accelerate, powered by rapid adoption of smartphones, growing data consumption and the expanding need for secure and reliable connectivity. At the same time, the emergence of Artificial Intelligence is creating new opportunities to transform customer experience, enhance productivity and extend the Airtel brand into adjacencies.
Against this backdrop, we continue to strengthen our market position across businesses while seeding the next phase of our growth with new digital growth engines. As we look ahead, our strategy remains simple and consistent. We will focus on winning quality customers by delivering a brilliant customer experience. Underpinning this are key enablers: digital at the core of everything we do, rigor through financial discipline with our war on waste while leveraging our strengths to extend into adjacencies.
Quality Customers
Our focus on acquiring and retaining quality customers is consistently delivering strong outcomes across our portfolio.
In Mobility, we sustained our momentum, achieving a lifetime high revenue market share and added over 11.6 million customers during the year. While tariff repair remains important for the long term health of the industry, we delivered growth through portfolio premiumization that covered feature phone to smartphone upgrades, postpaid growth, data monetization and expanding penetration of International Roaming.
In Homes, we delivered one of our strongest years yet, adding approximately 4.2 million customers during the year. We see significant headroom for growth in India’s home broadband market. We continue to remain obsessed about expanding Fiber and are now at over 45 million home passes. At the same time, we use Fixed Wireless Access as a complementary technology to increase our presence in the broadband market.
Our convergence strategy is gaining momentum. Customers increasingly seek simplicity, convenience and value through integrated connectivity experiences. One Airtel plan is helping us deepen engagement with our highest-value customers while improving customer retention. Within Digital TV, our IPTV proposition has seen encouraging adoption. Customers value the flexibility of accessing linear television, on-demand content and OTT services through a unified platform, reinforcing our broader convergence agenda.
Airtel Business continued to hold its leadership position in core connectivity while building meaningful scale across adjacencies such as Cloud, Cybersecurity, IoT, CPaaS and Data Centers. We ended the year with a strong order book and healthy pipeline across both domestic and global businesses.
Brilliant Customer Experience
Delivering an exceptional customer experience remains at the heart of everything we do.
We strengthened our digital infrastructure by expanding our network footprint and increasing fiber deployment across the country. During the year, we rolled out over 43,000 kilometers of fiber and further enhanced the resiliency and capacity of our transport network.
Our 5G rollout has progressed steadily. We are now transitioning our network towards advanced 5G capabilities and have launched Standalone Architecture. While this now operates at scale on Fixed Wireless Access, our Mobile network is also now transitioning in a phased manner to Standalone.
Our commitment to security and safety remains unwavering. Our AI-powered Anti-Spam solution has helped us identify spam calls and messages at massive scale, giving customers meaningful relief from a problem that affects them every day. This reflects our belief that technology must solve real customer pain points and create tangible differentiation for Airtel.
Accelerate Digital
Embedding digital at the core of our operations remains central to our strategy. Over the years, we have built strong capabilities across platforms, data, workflows and channels. These are now deeply wired into our ways of working and are helping us improve customer experience, drive agility and unlock new growth opportunities.
AI is now an important extension of this digital foundation and we have embedded AI at the core of our platforms. We use it to serve customers better, grow revenue more intelligently, improve productivity and run our networks more efficiently. In addition, AI is helping us improve how we engage with our customers and run our operations. Our Next Best Action capability helps us provide more contextual and relevant engagement across all our products including Financial services. We have now proven our AI capabilities to handle customer interaction at scale, improve workmanship on the fly and bring greater efficiency in software development. For the network, AI is helping optimize both performance and energy consumption.
We have now extended all our strengths across Africa to step up growth in that region. All our home-grown digital platforms have been extended improving our overall go to market excellence. In addition, we are now replicating all our capabilities across Homes and Airtel Business in Africa to provide acceleration to these emerging businesses.
Our digital platforms have also been now extended to Indus Towers to digitize the tower operation end to end. This is in line with our vision to be the most efficient tower company in the world. We are still in the early stages of this journey, but the impact is already visible. Our focus will be to scale AI with discipline, not as a standalone initiative, but as a capability that strengthens every part of Airtel.
War on Waste
The operating environment remains dynamic, with ongoing cost pressures across technology and infrastructure components. In response, we are identifying opportunities to simplify processes, eliminate waste and improve productivity through technology and automation. This discipline has now been extended across the group. Airtel Africa has strengthened its ongoing program to reduce waste by leveraging the operational experience and best practices developed in India. Indus has set itself the ambition of becoming the world’s most efficient tower company and has made significant progress on energy efficiency, reducing diesel consumption and digitizing field operations. While we have made progress, we believe there remains considerable opportunity to further enhance efficiency across the business.
Adjacencies
Our investments in digital adjacencies are beginning to create meaningful growth engines for the future. Airtel Cloud, our sovereign telco-grade cloud platform, is adding customers across industries. We see a significant opportunity to provide enterprises with secure, scalable and locally governed cloud infrastructure and services.
Nxtra continues to strengthen its position in India’s rapidly growing data center market. We remain committed to our ambition of building approximately 1 GW of capacity over the coming years and recently secured support from marquee investors, validating both the opportunity and our execution capabilities.
In Financial Services, we achieved an important milestone with the regulatory approval received by Airtel Money Limited to operate as a Non-Banking Financial Company. Together with Airtel Payments Bank and our broader digital ecosystem, this creates an exciting opportunity to expand access so as to provide simple, secure and innovative financial solutions for millions of customers.
War on Waste
The operating environment remains dynamic, with ongoing cost pressures across technology and infrastructure components. In response, we are identifying opportunities to simplify processes, eliminate waste and improve productivity through technology and automation. This discipline has now been extended across the group. Airtel Africa has strengthened its ongoing program to reduce waste by leveraging the operational experience and best practices developed in India. Indus has set itself the ambition of becoming the world’s most efficient tower company and has made significant progress on energy efficiency, reducing diesel consumption and digitizing field operations. While we have made progress, we believe there remains considerable opportunity to further enhance efficiency across the business.
ESG
We remain deeply conscious of our responsibility towards the environment, society and all our stakeholders.
ustainability is integrated into our business strategy. During the year, we accelerated our renewable energy initiatives and expanded solar access across our network infrastructure. We ended the year with approximately 42,000 network sites which have solar access.
Through the Bharti Airtel Foundation and our broader social impact initiatives, we are investing in education, digital inclusion and community development, helping create opportunities for future generations.
People
We have made meaningful progress on diversity and inclusion. Women now represent over 20 percent of our workforce, up significantly from a few years ago. While we are encouraged by this progress, we recognize that there is much more work to be done and remain committed to building a more diverse and inclusive organization.
In closing, I would like to express my gratitude to our customers, employees, partners and shareholders for their ongoing support. We look forward to your continued partnership as we move forward in our journey.
Gopal Vittal
Executive Vice Chairman