Bharti Airtel on Wednesday said that it will expand its businesses in rural areas over the next 12 months — whether it is mobile services, DTH, Enterprises or Cloud services — and in 5G, it will ramp up to top 150 cities to grow the revenue share.

“In 60,000, high potential regions, Airtel is not present. We could have gone there earlier, but now the time is right for us to expand in these areas. This expansion will give us our fair shareand add tailwinds to the business,” Gopal Vittal, Managing Director, Airtel, said at an earnings call.

In these villages, the company has identified roughly 40,000 high-potential community clusters. For Airtel, it is important that an individual tower is profitable and maximise the revenue from what it has now, he said.

For 5G, top 150 cities in India needs to be chosen because they account for “about 40 per cent of the Indian telecom market.” .

“We are using 5G as a lever to really drive our postpaid growth. Our 5G is now live in 70 cities and we will be live in about 300 cities by March and all (circles) will be covered by March 2024,” Vittal said.

The company on Tuesday reported a consolidated net profit of ₹1,588 crore for the third quarter ended December 31, up 91.5 per cent year-on-year (y-o-y) as compared with around ₹830 crore in October-December quarter last year.

Backed by strong and consistent performance across portfolio, the total revenue rose nearly 20 per cent y-o-y to ₹35,804 crore in the quarter in review as against ₹29,866 crore in corresponding period last financial year.

Average revenue per user (ARPU) for the quarter stood at ₹193 as compared to ₹163 in the corresponding quarter last year on the back of the company’s continued focus on quality customers and premiumisation, Airtel said.

Vittal reiterated that the ARPU has to reach up to ₹300 as it is critical for a “respectable return on capital”.

Meanwhile, Airtel on Wednesday partnered with Vultr, a privately-held cloud computing company, to offer cloud solutions to enterprises in India. As per the pact, Airtel will offer Vultr’s suite of cloud solutions to its enterprise customers, especially those in the digital space and help them gain global reach and cost-performance edge to build, test, and run demanding cloud workloads.

The cloud solutions will be hosted in Airtel’s data centres across Bengaluru, Mumbai and Delhi-NCR, enabling businesses to scale their digital operations globally, the company said in a statement.

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