Airtel’s struggle to please Street

Bharti Airtel Ltd's consolidated Ebitda for the December quarter (Q3FY26) grew by 4.1% sequentially to ₹30,783 crore.

- Manish Joshi

India's mobile services Ebitda crawled up by 2.2% quarter-on-quarter (q-o-q), but the metric for the Africa mobile business rose at a faster rate of 6.8% in constant currency.

Africa’s user base growth was higher at 3.2% versus India’s 1.2%. Data customer base rose 4.7% in Africa and can accelerate further as this customer base forms 45.6% of the total (79.8% in India).

As the share of data customer base grows, the Africa Arpu (average revenue per user) can get a further boost, given higher data Arpu at $2.70 versus $1.10 for voice. Even in terms of data usage per customer, Africa is at just one-third of India's 30 GB per month, indicating potential to move up. Still, currency devaluation poses a significant risk to the African telecom business of Bharti.