The Sunil Mittal interview: Airtel debt-free by 2029. Buybacks next?

As Sunil Bharti Mittal, founder and chairman of Bharti Enterprises Ltd, which owns telecom company Airtel, completes 50 years in business this year, he reflects on the journey, the decisions that shaped the group and the challenges of building businesses across sectors, in a conversation with Mint at his New Delhi office.

“To start from the ground up and create a $120 billion enterprise, for me it’s not going to be possible (at this stage),” said Mittal, 69, reflecting on the scale of what has been built and the limits of starting afresh at this stage of his career.

He also discussed Airtel’s future, tariff hikes, investments in artificial intelligence and data centres, the group’s other businesses, and his views on succession planning at the company.

Edited excerpts:

You said you would retire at 50.

No, not retire; I would never retire. I had said I would go into politics or something away from business.

Recently, you brought back the entry-level tariff plan. Usually, tariff hikes are followed by peers. Why did it not work out, this time?

The market is so competitive that you cannot stand alone beyond a point. Today, most of my plans command a premium, but there is a limit to how far we can go. You cannot have a supreme premium in a very difficult, competitive market.

In our case, you can consume whatever you want. If you actually want all of Jio’s traffic to come to me, I will take it. I have the capacity, and vice versa. So the capacities are unlimited. Vodafone Idea does not move, as you know, because it sells with a lot of difficulties, and if Jio does not move, then it gets difficult. We tried, but it is an experiment.

What about the target of reaching around ₹400 Arpu (average revenue per user)? How will you get there?

We need to reach ₹350. India’s whole quest to become a digital powerhouse over the next 10–15 years requires massive compute capacity and zillions of AI agents on the network. You need a much stronger network than we have today. That means more fibre, more subsea cables, more space technologies coming in, and mobile radios.

China has over a million towers; India has 350,000 today. We have to get to 600,000–700,000 towers, which means doubling from where we are today. We need serious financial capacity to do it. The upper end, which is stuck at ₹400–500, can easily go up to ₹600, ₹700. We have kept it artificially all free, unlimited at ₹400–500. That is the broken architecture.

Will tariff hikes ultimately be decided by the market leader, Jio?

No, Jio cannot move without… if he moves and we don’t, he is toast. The industry has to do it. But if the industry says, I want to kill you before I get to nirvana, that does not work. Even Vodafone Idea is out there; BSNL is out there.

Across Bharti Enterprises’ 50-year journey spanning telecom, space, hospitality, and real estate, what are your biggest bets outside of telecom?

There were multiple experiments that we started; we could not scale any one of them like telecom, and two or three of them had potential.

One was retail, clearly, with Walmart, which started very well; we opened up a lot of stores—both cash-and-carry and retail—and insurance.

But our focus could not move to those businesses away from telecom because almost every time we thought we could put more money, more capital, more resources into other businesses, we had fires burning here.

One by one, we exited software and skilling businesses, which were too sub-scale. Our insurance company went to ICICI Lombard, and for life insurance, we are now bringing in Prudential to really fire up their engine with 75% equity.

Real estate, we will carry on doing ourselves. And then we have invested in Haier, where Warburg Pincus and we took a 49% stake; we got 25%, and we will stay in this. Hospitality is a big business, which is mostly outside India.

Telecom is now the large mainstay that will remain largely the way it is today, very professionally run, with stewards of the shareholders. There, we are going to do big bets. Data centres, AI data centres, I think billions of dollars will go there.

And the third is financial services. We have Airtel Payments Bank, we have Airtel Money in Africa, which has got listed on the FTSE 100, and we have just started Airtel Money here as a non-banking financial company for lending to our customers.

What are the plans for listing Nxtra (the data centre business) and Airtel Payments Bank?

For the size of our group, having a company listed with a very small market capitalization just doesn’t sit well with the system. So the scale is important. [With] Nxtra, our ambition is by 2030 to get to 1 gigawatt. We have 250-260 megawatts, so it’s 4x from where we are today. So it will take 3-4 years, and then we could be ready.

Payments Bank, same, we are about ₹4,000 crore in revenue, ₹4,000 crore in deposits. It is profitable.

So, some of these bets could be looking interesting to list in 2030.

In terms of raising capital, do you think you have enough on the books to spend?

Airtel’s balance sheet has never been better. At one point in time when things were really tough, we were coming closer to four times debt to Ebitda (earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization). Today, we are less than one.

And if you do the projection, by 2029, we’ll be a debt-free company. And if you’re generating $14–15 billion Ebitda, your capacity to borrow is huge. So I don’t see us doing any more rights or fresh issues and all that. The company would be in a position to start buybacks.

How big is real estate as part of your portfolio?

I would say the entire Aerocity (a business and hospitality complex near Delhi airport), which is going on at the moment, the entire project would be in the vicinity of about ₹10,000 crore. It is the largest mall in India; it’s the largest business district. We are building nearly 13–14 million square feet there under Worldmark and high-quality assets.

We don’t go into land conversion and all the state issues. We take part in government auctions. It is a very clean business model; we do not want to go into areas where we have to get land conversion—buy land from farmers and all that. We don’t want that.

Can the second peak be taller than the first peak in businesses when you do other businesses?

I can only talk about my lifetime, the peak that we have built. You can only keep on building on top of that. To start something grounds-up and to create a $120-billion enterprise, for me, it’s not going to be possible (at this stage).

Your competitor calls itself a technology company. What’s next for Bharti, and what are your thoughts on getting into AI tokenisation?

We don’t manufacture any equipment; we buy equipment. Similarly, we will buy bare-metal servers and GPUs (graphics processing units) and bring them in for the benefit of our customers.

So we were selling minutes, and we are selling bits, GBs, and tomorrow the world is going to be tokens; we will be doing that.

What we have is customer relationships, brand, trust, and therefore we will deploy this equipment, and that’s why the AI data centre and our cloud operations team will roll this out for sovereign needs, for our enterprise customers.

And for retail customers, we are not doing our own LLMs (large language models), but when you consume ChatGPT or Claude or Grok, you will need to connect through a network here. And at that time, can I add value by maybe offering an opportunity to switch to an open-weight model, as opposed to Claude or GPT, to lower your token costs?

Why were phones your first manufacturing business? Why not retail? Why not something else?

(Mittal had begun assembling push-button phones in India in 1985, which eventually steered him towards the telecom sector.)

It could have been anything. But I was very clear that I had to do things that others didn’t do in India, and I had to bring new things because the big boys had given you no space in those days. There was no startup culture. You either become a supplier to them, a trader, or do small things; you couldn’t be in their space.

What were the constraints in looking at other businesses other than Sunil Mittal’s time?

I think it’s basically time and attention and some more money. And do remember one thing: to kickstart a project even today, I would say you need an entrepreneur; you can’t have professionals starting from the ground-up; it’s very hard. You need that maniacal determination, day in, day out, Sunday, no family, no home, travelling on a plane, on a train; that is necessary to build from the ground up. Professionals can acquire and then improvise, but from ground zero it is tough.

In the satcom (satellite communications) space, approvals are pending. What is the delay costing Eutelsat OneWeb?

We have put the investment into the ground stations. There are two ground stations. There is a smaller team here, but total revenue from India for OneWeb in a year will be $15–20 million. It’s a nice one; it’s not a big deal. That’s why we are patiently sitting down. (Bharti Enterprises is a major shareholder in Paris-headquartered Eutelsat Group, the parent company of satellite communications company Eutelsat OneWeb.)

Do you think there’s a need to expedite the approvals?

I don’t know what’s causing the delay, but every time I think we’re closer to a decision, there’s a geopolitical issue, and these are not Indian networks; they are foreign networks. You saw what happened in Ukraine; they dialled down the speed. There were catastrophic consequences in the war.

We seem to be just stuck because they (the government) have to open it for everybody. We don’t have inter-satellite links, whereas, as you know, Starlink (operated by Elon Musk’s SpaceX) has satellite links. They don’t need to come down, they can just be in space, they can deal there. Much more sophisticated satellites than ours, but it has security implications.

When Vodafone Idea completed the AGR (adjusted gross revenue) recalculation exercise, you talked about the need for a level-playing field. Airtel also has this history, and they are also sufferers there. Where are you on that? Have you stopped pursuing that with the government?

No, we keep pursuing it. In the end, I think the signal is that these are now matters in the legal domain. So we will take a decision now. But we are not seeking the entire Vodafone Idea-type package; they had the equity conversion, and they had other deferrals.

What we really are looking at is the calculation errors, the apparent errors that are there, which Vodafone Idea would have got relief on. That’s the only thing we are working on. I mean, the rest we are not even pursuing because we are not in a state where we want to offer equity conversion.

Will you go to court then?

I don’t know. The board or management has to make a decision, but hopefully in the next few months we should reach a conclusion.

What consumer insights do you wish you had 15–20 years ago that would have made your journey different?

This is one area where I would say, very proudly, we were very switched on to what customers need. Our insights into the customers’ needs were always very good. This is where we are deeply connected to the market. We pay full attention to it, and this is the difference between Airtel’s success and many other companies’ failure.

Yes, Jio came with free services for a year; then you have nothing to respond to. We tried to manage through that period with great difficulty, and you saw the stock price went to ₹220; things were quite shaky in 2017-18, but somehow we knew the playbook, we knew exactly how long this would last, and you just had to hold on.

Did Mukesh Ambani congratulate you 10 years later?

(Smiles) I also say, what he has done is also the world’s first. And he has made us better, no questions.

Give us a big view on succession at Bharti.

This is a different experiment. I have never seen any company having such high empowerment in the hands of professionals. We spend ₹35,000 crore a year in India, another ₹10,000 crore in Africa. I don’t get to sign 10 paise. And that kind of empowerment makes them (company professionals) the owners, and they are responsible for their decisions.

Every time a storm comes, the professional team looks for leadership. At companies like British Telecom or Unilever, they will look to the board. In India, they look to a shareholder, a steward; I happen to be a founder, a manager, a shareholder, and a steward.

The next generation will not be the founder. They may not even be the operators, since they are doing their own thing. But I am very confident that they will be good stewards. They will be very respectful of the model I have created and the value system they grew up with. They know that it’s a win-win situation. If we continue to keep this model going, it’s good for them as well, and I and the family will win anyway.

In non-Airtel businesses, the family is building up; they are the promoters; they are the founders.

Shravin (Bharti Mittal) is running his tech fund. He has gone to the Africa board now as a deputy chairman under Gopal Vittal (executive vice chairman of Bharti Airtel). In a few years, he could be ready to take over the chair.

Kavin (Bharti Mittal), after Hike, is looking at his next fix in the area of technology. He will come up with something. He is talking to Gopal and the team about AI, compute, LLMs, and new energy. (Shravin and Kavin are Sunil Bharti Mittal’s twin sons.)

My daughter (Eiesha Bharti Pasricha) is in the hospitality business with my son-in-law (Sharan Pasricha). They run 200 hotels.

Existing businesses—real estate—I don’t see anybody interested. So there are some businesses that will be run through professionals. It’s kind of a setup, clearly delineated from a typical family-business model.