(India and South Asia)
Dear Shareholders,
FY 2016-17 has been an eventful year. The entry of a new player in the industry triggered rapid consolidation. While the industry witnessed a de-growth in revenues, Airtel increased its market share across most circles. Airtel was also ranked as the 3rd Most Trusted Brand in India (#1 in Telecom) across industry sectors such as E-commerce, Online Services, FMCG and Financial Institutions. This success was made possible by rigorous execution of our strategy.
Go to Market Excellence: We drove several new initiatives to drive market excellence this year. We launched instant mobile activations through e-KYC. We also rolled out a new retailer application - Mitra App which enables recharges and acquisitions through a single platform. With over 3.5 lac biometric devices, Airtel’s acquisition and recharge platform has become one of the biggest digital transaction platforms in the country. In addition, recognising the need to grab higher share of 4G devices, we implemented solid innovations to build our share of 4G. Further in November 2016, we were the first to successfully launch Payments Bank – in line with the Government’s vision of financial inclusion. We leveraged our strong distribution backbone to create a strong ecosystem of Customers, Banking Points and Merchants leading to creation of more than 1,000 cashless villages across the country.
Brilliant Network Experience: One of the most important foundations upon which we deliver services to our customers is our network. We continued network investments under ‘Project Leap’. 180,000 mobile sites were rolled out in past 2 years, making it one of the largest network rollouts globally. We doubled our transmission capacity and increased mobile backhaul capacity by eight times. Overall we are proud to be the only company currently with 2G, 3G and 4G services in all 22 circles. In our effort to substantially improve the network experience, we continued our Open Network campaign and single-mindedly worked to eliminate customer frustration through the year.
Valuable Customers: We worked pro-actively on multiple fronts to gain valuable customers. We invested and upgraded more than 70% of our broadband customers to 40-100 mbps speeds through the new V-Fiber technology. We also made our postpaid proposition more attractive by widening our store footprint, family proposition and simplifying national and international roaming to prevent bill shocks. One of the most innovative actions we took towards the end of this year was to launch the new Airtel Internet TV (Powered by Android) - preloaded with Netflix, YouTube, Google Play Games, airtel Movies along with an inbuilt TV cast option.
War on Waste: We continued our emphasis on increasing productivity and reducing waste within our business. In the past three years, we had cost saving targets for ourselves and we have been able to meet them successfully. This is demonstrated by the fact that our Opex grew by only 4% this year versus 6.2% last year.
People: As an organisation we are highly committed to ensure growth and well-being of our people. Based on feedback from our annual people survey this year, we organised the first ever ‘Airtel Careers Fair’ to help employees take charge of their own careers and find a sustainable future within the Company.
As an organisation we continue to be committed to sustainable and inclusive growth. We have launched our fourth sustainability report this year, which encapsulates our initiatives on adoption of green technology aggressively. Bharti Foundation, with full support from our employees, has been doing remarkable work in engaging parents and the community to spread awareness of education and empowerment of Girl Child. These initiatives have made our corporate citizenship more meaningful.
As we look ahead, we expect an exciting but turbulent year – consolidation will continue and the new entrant will continue to disrupt the market. Internally, we view this as a once in a lifetime opportunity to grow market share. We strongly believe in exciting possibilities of our future driven by rapid digitisation and explosion of value-added adjacent services. We are determined to drive this change despite the competitive headwinds.
As we move ahead and embark into a new era of telecom in the country I would like to thank our customers, our people, our partners and our shareholders for their support and faith in us. We seek your continued guidance in our journey.
Gopal Vittal