Bharti Airtel Chairman Sunil Mittal on Monday said that Bharti Infratel has received bids from several players, including private equity player KKR, for buying a stake in the tower firm.
Speaking to a select group of Indian mediapersons at the ongoing Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Mittal said that KKR is the front-runner, but a final decision may be taken at the company’s board meeting after March.
“We have set up a committee to examine the bids. We may take a decision in the upcoming board meeting for the fourth quarter results,” Mittal said. Mittal declined to name the other bidders in the race or how much stake the company was planning to sell.
The Bharti chief also said that telecom operator Airtel was looking at acquisitions in Africa, in countries wherever the company is not among the top two players. “What is the point of being number third player in a country like Rwanda,” Mittal posed. On the overall telecom industry in India, Mittal said that the ongoing consolidation was good. “We could be down to three players,” he said.
Airtel has recently bought Telenor’s India operations. Earlier it had bought spectrum from Videocon and Qualcomm. Over the last six months a number of operators have been looking to merge operations including Vodafone and Idea Cellular primarily as a survival tactic against Reliance Jio.
Mittal said that tariffs announced by RJio are aggressive and Airtel will respond. “We will have to increase our capital expenditure due to competition,” he said. Airtel has announced it would provide free national roaming from April 1. Starting April 1, Airtel customers in India will enjoy free incoming roaming calls/SMS and there will be no premium on outgoing calls allowing them to speak freely wherever they are within the country. Also, there will be no additional data charges on national roaming. Home data packs for customers will apply even while they roam across India, the company said.
“India will be the lowest tariff market,” Mittal added.