Dear Shareholders,
The financial year 2024-25 has been a year of steady progress for Airtel and the industry as a whole. In July 2024, the industry saw the much-awaited tariff repair, that was essential for improving the financial health of the sector. That said, we believe that further repair will be necessary to ensure sustainable improvement in return on capital employed.
As we go into the next year, we remain focused on our core strategy – winning with quality customers, delivering exceptional experiences, embedding digital at the core of all we do and stripping out waste. Our performance in FY 2024-25 reaffirms the effectiveness of our strategy.
Quality Customers
We saw sustained growth across our portfolio and achieved a lifetime high in revenue market share across all businesses.
In mobility, we delivered a record-high revenue market share of ~40 percent and added over 9.3 million new customers in FY 2024-25. We continue to hold a premium position in the industry, increasing our ARPU to an industry high of ₹245 – an increase of ₹36 from the previous year. Our focus remains on growing our postpaid base, driving smartphone upgrades and expanding international roaming penetration. 5G devices account for 85 percent of total smartphone shipments and we continue to capture our fair share of the 5G device market.
Broadband growth has gained momentum – we added over 2.4 million new broadband customers. Additionally, we launched Fixed Wireless Access (FWA) in more than 2,500 cities, further enhancing our broadband footprint. We further strengthened our content offerings by signing an exclusive partnership to offer Apple TV+ and Apple Music to our Wi-Fi and postpaid customers. We also signed an agreement with SpaceX to bring Starlink's high speed internet to our customers. Starlink will complement and enhance Airtel's suite of products to provide ubiquitous connectivity to our customers.
On Digital TV, despite DTH industry headwinds, we achieved a record high market share. We are making structural changes to our DTH business by eliminating subsidies, which will benefit cash flow. Our IPTV launch has seen encouraging response from customers, offering enhanced convenience, a superior user experience, and the flexibility to watch on-demand content, catch up content as well as linear broadcast content.
Airtel Business saw slower overall growth due to our deliberate shift away from low-margin, commodity business. However, the rest of the portfolio continued to perform well despite global headwinds. We continue to invest in digital services, including Cloud, Cybersecurity, IoT, and CPaaS. Airtel Finance is growing rapidly and our partnership with Bajaj Finance is poised to accelerate this further.
Brilliant Customer Experience
Providing an exceptional customer experience remains the core foundation of our strategy. We have made significant strides in enhancing our network performance through increased use of digital tools. Last year, we rolled out a 1 km x 1 km network grid view, which delivered encouraging results in reducing churn across key markets. Building on that, we now have visibility down to a 100 m x 100 m grid. This level of granularity is enabling us to identify network issues with greater precision and resolve them with structurally. In addition, we are using AI/ML tools extensively to improve performance and drive sustainability in our network. Airtel has been recognised with all five Open Signal awards for 5G experience – a testament to our dedication to providing an outstanding experience for our customers.
We have also enhanced our network coverage and capacity by deploying ~20K network sites, strengthening our transport backbone by laying over 44K route kilometres of fiber and extending fiber home passes to 7.2 million additional households.
Our industry-first Anti-SPAM tool has given significant relief to our customers, identifying over 37 billion spam calls to date, which translates to the detection of an impressive 1,650 spam calls every second. Since its launch in September 2024, Airtel customers have seen 16 percent reduction in SPAM calls. We continue to strengthen our fight against SPAM with the launch of new features.
Accelerate Digital
Over the years, we have transformed our digital orchestration and fully wired it into our ways of working. We continue to work on two focus areas – one, building gold standard digital tools. These tools help us simplify our ways of working, drive efficiency and enable us to identify new growth avenues. Two, the transition from a product to a platform approach, which has given us solid results in our B2C businesses, is now being implemented in the B2B segment as well. We are now working towards embedding AI in everything we do.
War on Waste
Our commitment to fiscal discipline and cost optimisation is central to our operations. We continue to strip out waste while maintaining high service standards. In FY 2024-25, we saved over ₹2,200 crores in network opex. While we have made significant strides, we believe there is always room to strip out waste in our business.
ESG
We remain focused on our environmental and social responsibilities. Our ESG Committee and management team continue to drive initiatives that advance sustainability and social impact.
Our solarization drive has accelerated, with over 30K network sites now solar-powered. In collaboration with Nokia, we have integrated energy-efficient AI solutions into our radio network, reducing Airtel's carbon emissions by an estimated 143K metric tonnes annually. In addition, Nxtra is the first data centre in India to deploy AI for next-generation facilities, increasing asset life and reducing non-IT power consumption by 10 percent.
Bharti Airtel Foundation's educational initiatives have reached over 3.7 million children and 3.3 lakh+ teachers across 36K schools.
People
We continue to prioritize diversity in our workforce, with women now comprising over 60 percent of our campus recruits. Our remote work program has enabled qualified women in smaller towns to take on tech-lead roles.
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
Vice Chairman & Managing Director