Airtel scouts for potential acquisitions in B2B space; eyes deep strategic alliances with top companies

For the B2B business, Gopal Vittal said that the market is large, and adjacencies are driving a bulk of the growth.

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Bharti Airtel is looking for potential acquisitions in the B2B space to grow its enterprise business and is looking to strike "deep strategic alliances with top companies on the lines of its recent Google Cloud deal, Managing Director Gopal Vittal said during the Q4 earnings call on May 15.

"This is an area where some of our capabilities and adjacencies can be strengthened. I have nothing to report right now, but we keep looking for opportunities that can strengthen our portfolio," Vittal said.

Airtel Business delivered revenue growth of 14.1 percent YoY in the January-March quarter. The telco said its emerging digital products are also yielding strong results.

For the B2B business, Vittal said that the market is large, and adjacencies are driving a bulk of the growth. "...the top 500 accounts comprise 70 percent of this market. The emerging business segment, commonly called SME, has also started to grow after a couple of years of slowdown," he said.

"We're now looking to strike deep strategic alliances with a few top companies, so we can package solutions along with our own. We announced a strategic alliance with Google to gain a significant share of the Indian cloud market, which is expected to reach $18 billion by 2027," he added.

Bharti Airtel entered into a long-term collaboration with Google Cloud to deliver cloud solutions to Indian businesses. The strategic collaboration will offer a suite of cloud solutions from Google Cloud to fast-track cloud adoption and modernisation for Airtel’s customers. The Sunil Mittal-led telco will provide a suite of cloud-managed services to its customer base of over 2,000 large enterprises and one million emerging businesses.

Airtel said it is currently operating private 5G networks for eight to nine private networks, though it described the opportunity in this space as "niche."

Vittal said that Airtel's non-mobile business is about 20 percent of its portfolio. "It is a business that can grow much faster given the opportunity and adjacencies on B2B."

On the 5G standalone network deployment, Airtel has a pilot underway in one state, which will be extended to another circle soon.

"There are a lot of trials that are happening to see how this will work out. The mid-band holdings are really a big and very, very priceless part of the overall SA strategy...fixed wireless access, we've launched into 25 cities. We have the outdoor CPE that's been launched in 25 cities," he said.

Airtel said that its FWA or fixed wireless access service will complement its fiber broadband.

Vittal said that scaling of Airtel's FWA service will take time due to the CPE supply issue. Additionally, the telco is currently fine-tuning offerings along with training of employees.

"All of this takes its time. In quarter two, you should see the full-scale impact of fixed wireless access. As of now, we are gearing up to make sure that the velocity of this increases. This will always be a complement to fiber where there is fiber. Obviously, we'll put focus on fiber because experience given the better uplink and downlink and more resilient network that fiber has, will always be better than a wireless network," Vittal explained.

But given the unutilized spectrum on fixed wireless access from 3.5 gigahertz, FWA will be a very good complement where fiber is not reached, he added.