Buy Bharti Airtel; target of Rs 2420: ICICI Securities

ICICI Securities's research report on Bharti Airtel

Bharti Airtel (Bharti)’s Q2FY26 print was impressive. The company reported a commendable performance across segments, incremental EBITDA margin in the mobile segment, higher consol. FCF (after finance cost) of INR 152bn and pre-tax RoCE at 19.7% in Q2FY26-annualised. Airtel Africa’s performance continues to surprise positively. Bharti is now scaling new growth frontiers – home including FWA, data centre, cloud and software services powered by AI and other digital services. It has signed a marque deal with Google for data centre, core connectivity and cable landing station at Visakhapatnam. Our EBITDA estimate is now ~2% higher over FY26–28E (entirely from Africa).

Outlook

Our SoTP-based TP stands revised at INR 2,420 (earlier INR 2,400) with an unchanged EV/EBITDA multiple of 16x for India business and 7x for Africa. We maintain BUY.