Telecom operator Bharti Airtel has successfully landed the Sea-Me-We 6 (Southeast Asia-Middle East-West Europe-6) submarine cable in Chennai. This follows the cable’s earlier landing in Mumbai on December 30, 2024.
The 21,700 Rkm subsea cable, engineered and installed by SubCom, links India with Singapore and France (Marseille) while traversing Egypt through terrestrial cables. The system is designed to enhance connectivity between Asia, the Middle East, and Europe, providing high-capacity, low-latency data transmission. This cable system will bring a whopping 220 TBPs of global capacity to India.
With this, Airtel has further enhanced its network presence with diversified global capacity in the submarine cable system. The cable landing, both in Mumbai and Chennai, will be fully integrated with Airtel’s data centre arm, Nxtra by Airtel, at its facilities in the respective cities to enable global hyperscalers and businesses in the country to access international connectivity and data centre services seamlessly.
Sharat Sinha, Director and CEO of Airtel Business, said, “At Airtel we strive to provide the best in class services to our customers and this new investment and milestone would further improve our secure, diverse and scalable global network.
We are delighted to further strengthen our global connectivity by landing one of the largest cable systems into our facilities. This complements our existing network strength of 400,000 Rkms across 50 countries.”
As a key member of the consortium of the Sea-Me-We-6 cable system, Airtel has invested in the core cable and has additionally co-built a private network of four fiber pairs between Singapore, Chennai and Mumbai.
Airtel’s global network spans five continents. The company has investments in 34 cables globally with some of the recent ones including 2Africa, Southeast Asia-Japan Cable 2 (SJC2) and Equiano.
Apart from these cables that connect India to key regions like APAC, Europe, the Middle East and US, Airtel’s global subsea network investments also include large cable systems like i2i Cable Network (i2icn), Europe India Gateway (EIG), IMEWE, Sea-Me-We-4, AAG, Unity, EASSy, Gulf Bridge International (GBI) and Middle East North Africa Submarine Cable (MENA Cable) amongst many others.
Bharti Airtel on Thursday posted a 460.9% increase in its consolidated net profit to ₹16,134.6 crore for the third quarter of the current fiscal (Q3 FY25), up from ₹2,876.4 crore reported in the year-ago period.
The telecom major’s revenue from operations jumped to ₹45,129.3 crore for the reporting quarter, up 19.08% from ₹37,899.5 crore in Q3FY24.
While Bharti Airtel announced its Q3 FY25 earnings post-market hours, the company’s stock ended 2.32% down at ₹1,621.90 apiece on the NSE on Thursday, February 6. The company’s market capitalisation stands at ₹9,24,347.02 crore.
“We delivered another consistent quarter with consolidated revenue of ₹45,129 crore. Indus Towers consolidation is effective this quarter. India revenue (excluding Indus) grew by 4.8% sequentially. Africa maintained a strong constant currency sequential growth trajectory of 5.6%. India mobile delivered strong performance led by residual flow-through of tariff repair and underlying levers of premiumization,” said Gopal Vittal, Vice-Chairman and MD of Bharti Airtel, in a company press release.
He added, “We reported another quarter of industry-leading ARPU growth to reach ₹245. We added 6.5 million smartphone users underpinned by our focus on acquiring quality customers and portfolio premiumization. Homes business saw further step up in customer additions with the acceleration of FWA expansion.”
Bharti Airtel Q3: Key highlights
The company’s consolidated earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortisation (EBITDA) stood at ₹24,880 crore, while the EBITDA margin was at 55.1%.
Its consolidated net income (before Exceptional items) grew by 121.3% to ₹5,514 crore.
Revenues of mobile services in India rose by 21.4% year-on-year (YoY), led by tariff repair, strong smartphone customer additions and underlying mix improvement, the release noted.
Airtel Business revenues of the company were up by 8.7% YoY, while Digital TV revenues grew by 2.9% YoY.
Revenues from the company’s Indian business increased to 34,654 crore, up 24.6% YoY. EBITDA for this business was up by 32.3% YoY to ₹19,850 crore and the EBITDA margin was at 57.3%.
While the total customer base of the company stood at nearly 58 crore across 15 countries, its customer base from the Indian business was at 41 crore.