Bharti Enterprises Chairman Sunil Bharti Mittal on Thursday said he hopes to pass the baton to the next generation over the next decade, but before that wants to restore Bharti Telecom’s controlling stake in Bharti Airtel.
Speaking during Airtel’s FY26 earnings call, Mittal said his “cherished desire” was for Bharti Telecom to once again own more than 50% of Airtel over the next decade as the group prepares for an eventual leadership transition.
Bharti Telecom historically held a controlling stake in Airtel, but its shareholding has diluted over the years because of capital raising exercises and strategic transactions.
Restoring Control
“The principal direction or vision that I carry in my mind is all shares that we can from both ICIL or Bharti family entities and Singtel should go into Bharti Telecom as much as possible,” he said.
The comments came days after Airtel approved a share-swap transaction that will increase its holding in Bharti Airtel Africa to 78% from about 62%. Mittal said the deal strengthens Bharti Telecom’s long-term ownership ambitions on multiple fronts.
According to him, the transaction reduces the ownership gap between Bharti Telecom and Singapore Telecommunications, which has been gradually lowering its direct stake in Airtel. Once the transaction is completed, the differential between the two shareholders will narrow to 3.6 percentage points.
Mittal said a higher holding in the Africa business would also improve Airtel’s future cash generation through dividends and buybacks, creating additional financial capacity for Bharti Telecom to increase its Airtel stake over time.
“More dividends, more buybacks. (The) Idea would be to keep using that twin lever to get BTL above the 50% stake,” he said.
Avoiding the IT Trap
Even as Airtel raised its FY26 dividend to Rs 24 per share from Rs 16 a year earlier, Mittal said the company would avoid the capital allocation approach followed by parts of the IT services sector, where companies focused heavily on shareholder distributions instead of building future businesses.
“We’ll never become like IT companies who have done nothing but just taken money out as dividends and buybacks and they (have) become a shadow of themselves. Many of those companies should have been buying leading-edge businesses in their own industry in the last 10-15 years. They would have been in a different position today,” Mittal said.
Instead, Airtel plans to continue investing in telecom infrastructure, home broadband, data centres, cloud services and financial services businesses. The company reiterated plans to scale up its data centre arm Nxtra Data to 1 gigawatt capacity over the next few years while also expanding its sovereign cloud offerings.
Executives said Airtel was also building out its financial services platform after receiving approval from the Reserve Bank of India for a non-banking finance company licence.
Alongside expansion plans, Airtel flagged multiple drivers for future average revenue per user growth, including smartphone upgrades, postpaid additions, international roaming and bundled home-mobile offerings.
Vice-chairman Gopal Vittal said India’s telecom pricing structure remained “broken” because unlimited data plans constrained monetisation, adding that tariff structures would eventually need correction as data consumption continued to rise.