Dear Shareholders,

FY 2014-15 was an exciting year for us. During the year, we continued to strengthen our go-to-market operation, launch innovative data propositions, accelerate postpaid growth, enhance customer experience and strip out waste. As a result, our India mobile business grew 11.3% with an EBIT growth of 37.1%. We also maintained consistent growth across all our other businesses and more importantly ensured that we have a team that is cohesive and motivated.

We secured our future in the critical spectrum auctions held in March. Overall, spectrum worth ` 1,098,749 Mn was bought by all the operators, of which Bharti Airtel acquired spectrum worth ` 291,291 Mn. We now have a pan-India mobile broadband footprint with recent acquisition of 3G and 4G spectrum. In addition, we also strengthened our position in the 900 MHz band, enabling us to provide 3G services on this band as well.

On go-to-market excellence, we continue to push automation of our sales force processes and emphasise the quality of acquisition, while also stepping up the pace of customer additions.

On the data services front, we launched several innovations, such as the One Touch Internet (OTI) and Wynk Music. One Touch Internet was meant to provide new users an opportunity to sample the world of internet, thus easing their transition to the world of the internet. Wynk Music was launched with a disruptive proposition for streaming music. It offers a library of more than 1.8 Mn songs to our customers and crossed 5 Mn downloads in less than six months of launch. We have expanded our 4G footprint across many more cities and have successfully positioned our brand as 'The Smartphone Network'. Last year witnessed one of our largest site deployment and refarming initiative as well. These efforts helped us improve our data offerings and experience significantly.

On Airtel Money, we partnered with Kotak Mahindra Bank to apply for the payments bank license. We believe that this initiative is critical to achieving the objective of transitioning to a cashless economy.

We accelerated the growth of postpaid through the launch of several innovative offerings. The myPlan product was extended to B2B customers as well as re-packaged for a complete family proposition. Footprint of our retail stores was expanded through both own and franchisee outlets. We automated several customer facing processes and are continuously improving the quality of call centres, so that we give superior experience to our customers.

Identifying and weeding out waste from our business is a top priority for us. In the past two years, we had set ambitious cost-saving targets for ourselves and, we have been able to meet them successfully.

Finally, Bharti Airtel has constantly strived to be among the preferred places of work for the smartest in the industry. Last year, we strengthened our internal performance management processes and stepped up recruitment from the top engineering and management institutes in the country. We continue to encourage our talent to build a holistic long-term career at Airtel.

As we strive for business growth and excellence, we continue to fulfil our responsibility to the environment and our obligation to the society. We are launching our third Sustainability Report this year that spells out our initiatives for environment sustainability. Bharti Foundation, with full support from our employees, has been doing remarkable work in the area of promoting education among underprivileged rural children. These initiatives have made our corporate citizenship more meaningful.

As we look ahead to the future, we strongly believe that India is at the cusp of another telecom revolution. This time round it is focused on data. The government's 'Digital India' initiative has the potential to transform the daily lives of our people by bringing in greater transparency and efficiency in delivery of public services and expand the reach to markets, which were otherwise considered remote. Airtel is uniquely positioned to make a significant contribution to the 'Digital India' goals. We have the assets in terms of spectrum and network, the talent and the innovations to make a significant impact.

Last but not the least, I want to thank our customers, our people, our partners and our shareholders for reposing faith in us and helping script this ongoing story.

Gopal Vittal