India's Bharti Airtel buys airwaves worth $820 mln in downbeat spectrum auction (updated)

Bharti Hexacom

26/06/2024 14:58

(Recasts throughout with details on spectrum sale, background)
    By Kashish Tandon and Nikunj Ohri
       BENGALURU/NEW DELHI, June 26 (Reuters) - India's Bharti
Airtel  BRTI.NS  has spent 68.57 billion rupees ($820.80
million), the most among its peers, to acquire telecom spectrum
at a government auction that ended on Wednesday, although their
combined bids were well short of the amount on offer.
    Overall, telecom companies bid for spectrum worth 113.40
billion rupees to acquire 141 megahertz (MHz) of airwaves, much
lower than the 962.38 billion rupees worth of spectrum on offer,
as was expected since firms were mainly looking to renew or
shore up their holdings.
    Bharti Airtel, the no.2 telecom operator by subscribers in
the world's second-largest smartphone market, said it bought 97
MHz spectrum that was expiring this year and acquired additional
spectrum to boost its mid-band holding, commonly used for 5G
connectivity.  
    Reliance Industries  RELI.NS  unit Reliance Jio Infocomm,
the top operator in the country, bought spectrum worth 9.74
billion rupees, while Vodafone Idea  VODA.NS  bought spectrum
worth 35.1 billion rupees.
    This year's auction was expected to be limited in scale
compared with the last one in 2022 when 51.2 GHz of radio
frequencies were sold for a record 1.5 trillion rupees, mainly
as the 5G spectrum was on auction for the first time.
    "As auction for 5G spectrum was held recently and 5G
monetization is still in progress, no bidding took place in
800MHz, 2300MHz, 3300MHz and 26GHz bands," the telecom
department said in a statement on Wednesday.
    "We are looking at hopefully an aggressive rollout ... as
that builds out, probably demand for spectrum in the 5G bands
will also increase once the current amount of
spectrum saturates," a government source told reporters.
    A total of 10GHz in airwaves, ranging between 800 MHz and 26
gigahertz (GHz), were up for sale in this year's auction, which
has been delayed twice.

($1 = 83.5400 Indian rupees)

 (Reporting by Nikunj Ohri and Sarita Chaganti Singh in New
Delhi; additional reporting by Hritam Mukherjee in Bengaluru;
Editing by Mrigank Dhaniwala, Savio D'Souza and Sohini Goswami)
 ((Hritam.Mukherjee@thomsonreuters.com; X: @MukherjeeHritam;))