Bharti Enterprises founder and chairman Sunil Bharti Mittal has said that members of the next generation of the Bharti family will become more visible ‘at the shareholders’ table’ in the coming years, signalling a gradual succession plan within the group.
Mittal said the younger family members would be mentored by him, executive vice-chairman Gopal Vittal, and the senior leadership team as they gradually assume larger roles. The comments offer the clearest indication yet of how succession planning is evolving at the Bharti Group, signalling continuity while retaining professional management oversight at one of India’s largest telecom and diversified business conglomerates.
Speaking about succession planning as he approaches 70, Mittal said in a recent investor call with analysts that he still has ‘some years left’ to contribute to Bharti Airtel and Bharti Enterprises.
“The next generation of my family—a larger family—is all building muscle in different forms and shapes. They're running their own businesses, their own outfits and getting trained outside the system,” Mittal told analysts in a call on 26 February. Calling it a ‘unique experiment’ unlike other Indian promoter entities, Mittal said, “all of them (Mittal family next-gen members) are learning their trade, their businesses in a manner, which I believe is the better way of being independent, autonomous, having their failures and successes, seeing the pain points of businesses, managing conflicts.”
Mittal has two sons and a daughter.
Shravin Mittal founded London-headquartered investment firm Unbound and is also the managing director of Bharti Global, the international investment arm of group holding company Bharti Enterprises. He led the group's investment in satellite communication company OneWeb.
His twin brother, Kavin Mittal, founded and ran messaging app Hike, which later pivoted to money gaming. Hike shut down last year after the money gaming ban in India. They have a sister, Eisha, who is a lifestyle investor based in London, according to media reports.
Sunil Mittal has two brothers, the elder Rakesh and the younger Rajan.
Push for ₹350 Arpu
Bharti Airtel, India’s second-largest telecom operator by market share, is leading the market in average revenue per user (Arpu) at ₹259 per month, driven by high-paying subscribers and growing data consumption on its network. The telecom operator, which has been aiming for a ₹300 Arpu to achieve a sustainable return on capital employed (RoCE), has now shifted the goalposts to reach a ₹350 Arpu.
Arpu is a key metric for telecom operators as it shows how much value each customer contributes to the business. Higher Arpu generally indicates stronger monetization and better profitability potential.
Compared with Airtel's ₹259 Arpu per month as of December end, Jio's Arpu was ₹213.70, while Vodafone Idea's was ₹172.
“I remain very hopeful that we will get to ₹300, but adjusting for inflation and all, I think we should have a new slogan…An Arpu of ₹350 would be the most appropriate Arpu in today's timeframe to have a sustainable, solid, financially viable telecom company,” Mittal said, adding that the company will keep the low-end entry points affordable for all its customers, given India is a price-sensitive market. However, at the mid-to-upper end, Airtel believes there is scope for upselling and restructuring its data packs.
“I see no reason why heavy consumers, business users and high-end users should be paying only ₹400 a month, which, as you know, is now nearly about $4 a month...but a dollar or two ($1-2) more to provide them these high-quality, high bandwidth services is a legitimate expectation,” he said.
Besides guidance on Arpu, during the call Mittal also outlined a decisive new growth phase for Bharti Airtel, discussing the recent ₹20,000 crore investment in Airtel Money, the group’s non-banking finance company (NBFC), and aggressive AI-driven data centre expansion beyond 1GW. The telecom operator is looking to have a progressive dividend policy to reward its shareholders.
NBFC support
The company said that of the ₹20,000 crore investment in Airtel Money, the first-year capital outlay will be 10%, or about ₹1,500-2,000 crore, which will be gradually scaled up. “This (Airtel Money) can be a very large business within the Airtel ecosystem. I really hope that in the next 5-7 years, we will have a Bajaj Financial Services type of company within Airtel's ecosystem. I remain truly confident about it,” Mittal said.
To be sure, Airtel is banking on its 400 million customers for the success of its lending business and will initially tap its top 100 million customers for the services.
When analysts asked about risks from government relief to Vodafone Idea, Mittal said, “It's very hard for anybody to come from behind, especially when the market is growing at 8-10%.”
He explained that this would mean taking 80-90% of the new additions or new growth to get a slightly improved market share. “It's very very difficult because neither us nor the other major player are going to yield too much ground because we are going to fight for every customer in the marketplace which we have been doing for the last three decades,” Mittal said adding that the same is going to very tough for an operator like Vodafone Idea which only has a 14-15% revenue market share and is not present in a meaningful way in almost half of the markets.
Even as Mittal outlined a strong path to higher free cash flows, analysts have expressed concerns. “There is limited room for further tariff hikes if we are already approaching steady state Arpus. This would limit the overall growth leading to multiple de-rating eventually,” analysts at BofA Securities said in a note dated 27 February.
“Bharti’s right to win in the datacenter business is not clear. Globally, very few telcos have succeeded in the DC business. Some investors think Bharti may get an implied conglomerate discount given its businesses like NBFCs, datacenters, etc.,” BofA Securities said.
Data centre dash
Bharti is making serious investments in data centres. The company said it will not stop at 1GW capacity and would go beyond that as it continues to attract more long-term customers. Bharti Airtel is also tying up with AI companies to bring services to the customers. During the call, the management said the company is in advanced discussions with several companies to bring their AI applications to its users.
Recently, Airtel entered into partnerships with Perplexity and Adobe.
“We are not putting billions of dollars into GPU (Graphics Processing Unit) procurement and offering them as services, but we are putting our arms around areas where we understand this business well and know that these bets will be solid long-term bets and have committed customer bases,” Mittal said.
The company’s executive vice-chairman, Gopal Vittal, said the company is more aligned with small language models, using open-source AI to tap into enterprises going forward with the solutions.
“We believe that actually the model for us is to use open-source LLMs (large language models), which is what we're doing today…really a lot of our effort is on small language models for enterprise use cases. We have about 350 to 400 GPUs already used for training...We believe this will be at about 2,000 odd GPUs (in a couple of years) and that will help us build some of these long, small language applications,” Vittal said.
Bharti Airtel will broadly spend about ₹30,000 crore on capex in India. The Africa business will see investment of over $1 billion (over ₹9,000 crore). “If for the next 5-7 years, we see a secular depreciation of currency, then Airtel Africa is poised to be a $10 billion revenue company with $5 billion plus Ebitda,” Mittal said.
Alteration in promoter stake
On changes in the promoter stake at Airtel going forward, Mittal said Bharti Telecom (BTL), which owns 41% in the listed company, is the principal vehicle for owning Bharti. Over time, both Singtel and the Bharti group have been selling down their core treasury stakes.
According to Mittal, the 8% stake left between Singtel and the Bharti group (7% at Singtel and 1% at the Mittal family) will be brought to market in an orderly manner over the next several years.
To be sure, Singtel, through Pastel Ltd, owns a 7.5% stake in Bharti Airtel, and Mittal-led promoter entity, Indian Continent Investment, owns a 0.9% stake, as per the shareholding disclosed on BSE in December.
The stake is over and above Singtel's direct holding of 20% stake in Bharti Telecom, in which Bharti Group has a 20.46% stake.
Mittal said the plan is to make Bharti Telecom the sole promoter entity.
Meanwhile, in a bid to curb spam and digital fraud beyond traditional telecom networks, Bharti Airtel on Sunday said it has partnered with Google to introduce secure Rich Communication Services (RCS) messaging in India.
RCS, a more advanced version of SMS that supports media sharing and interactive features, will be integrated with Airtel’s network-level spam detection systems and Google’s filtering tools to enable sender verification, real-time checks, and compliance with users 'Do Not Disturb preferences.
The move seeks to plug gaps in OTT messaging platforms that have increasingly been used for spam and financial fraud.