Intermission E03: Airtel

Description

Stream a video, send a message, call a loved one. For nearly 474 million Indians, that connection runs through Bharti Airtel.Over three decades, the company has made it through price wars, near-bankruptcy, a botched overseas acquisition, and two incursions from Reliance. Each time, it weathered the crisis and came back stronger. Investors who held on through every crisis have been rewarded with returns that match the best businesses in India. But the forces that shaped Airtel — regulation, technology, and competition — have never stopped moving. Jio is back, this time with a $110 billion bet on AI and data centres. The hyperscalers are customers today and competitors tomorrow. And the telecom industry is shifting from minutes to bytes to tokens. At the centre of it all is Sunil Bharti Mittal, a founder who operates with the intensity of someone still trying to prove himself, even after building a company worth more than $100 billion. He turns 70 in 2027. He wants to raise his family's stake in Airtel from 40% to 51% — a Rs 1 lakh crore buyback he believes can be funded through dividends and share repurchases over three to four years. The question that now hangs over Airtel is what happens to it when Mittal is no longer at its core.Airtel has survived every version of telecom so far. But it hasn't fully solved its three-body problem yet.Where does it go from here?We also have an interactive webpage to explore the history of Airtel Finance with reading lists, infographics and source notes: https://the-ken.com/intermission/the-unkillable-network-bharti-airtel/ You can also watch the episode on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O_dONpkY7-U----------Chapters: 00:00 — Introduction4:09— Chapter 1: Ludhiana — India's industrial Manchester16:00 — Chapter 2: Delhi — School of power & hard knocks41:07 — Chapter 3: Policy pivot and partnership model1:09:27 — Chapter 4: The Reliance juggernaut's first attack1:31:05 — Chapter 5: Akhil Gupta, the 2000s, and the art of financial judo1:54:42 — Chapter 6: The Singaporean pi