BENGALURU (Reuters) -Indian telecom operator Bharti Airtel Ltd said on Tuesday it will raise $1 billion in debt, after it reported better-than-expected quarterly revenue on higher tariff rates.
Airtel said https://bit.ly/3oAZmLt it would raise the amount, 75 billion rupees ($1 billion), by issuing non-convertible debt securities, including debentures and bonds, but did not reveal how it would use the money.
Engaged in a fierce price war that started since the entry of billionaire Mukesh Ambani’s Reliance Jio into the Indian telecom sector in 2016, Airtel has been raising capital for development of its products and services to lure more customers.
Last month, Alphabet Inc’s Google said it will invest up to $1 billion in Airtel to help with the development of its devices, home broadband, data centres, cloud adoption and 5G networks.
India’s telecom sector has been benefiting from increased data usage as more people take to remote working due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Mobile data consumption for Airtel, India’s second-largest telecom company by subscriber base, rose 33.8% in the third quarter from a year earlier.
The company in November https://bit.ly/3gJLTgh increased tariffs on prepaid plans, as did rivals Reliance Jio and Vodafone Idea, reiterating that the industry’s average revenue per user (ARPU)— a key performance indicator in the telecoms industry — needs to go as high as 300 rupees for a financially healthy business model.
Third-quarter ARPU for Airtel rose 11.6% to 163 rupees, ahead of Jio’s 151.6 rupees.
Airtel’s subscriber base in India grew to about 356 million, adding 3 million 4G subscribers during the last three months of 2021 to reach 195.5 million.
Consolidated revenue from operations climbed 12.6% to 298.67 billion rupees ($4 billion) compared with estimates of 291.97 billion rupees, according to Refinitiv IBES data.
Consolidated net profit fell 2.8% to 8.30 billion rupees.
($1 = 74.7170 Indian rupees)
(Reporting by Rama Venkat in Bengaluru; editing by Uttaresh.V and Shinjini Ganguli)
