Bharti Airtel Q2 profit seen up 46% on tariff gains

Bharti Airtel Limited ( BHARTIARTL ) is expected to report stronger Q2FY27 earnings as tariff-led revenue gains start flowing through. Street estimates point to ₹60,298 crore revenue (+15.6% YoY) and ₹9,897 crore net profit (+45.7% YoY), while mobile ARPU is expected to rise to ₹271. The key driver is Airtel’s push toward higher-value customers. The company discontinued its ₹299 prepaid plan in August, nudging users toward the ₹349 pack. Along with 5G upgrades, higher data consumption and prepaid-to-postpaid migration, this should support ARPU growth. What matters is that Airtel’s earnings story is increasingly shifting from subscriber growth to monetisation. A 2.7% sequential ARPU increase may look modest, but in telecom, even small ARPU gains can have a meaningful impact on profitability given the largely fixed-cost nature of the network business. The headline risk is subscriber churn. Airtel is expected to add about 1.9 million subscribers, lower than the previous quarter, while Reliance Jio added 9.1 million users in the September quarter. Investors will therefore focus on whether recent tariff actions cause low-end users to switch operators. Another aspect worth tracking is diversification. Airtel Africa reported 26% revenue growth to $1.97 billion, while the enterprise business continues to benefit from demand for connectivity, cloud, data centres and IoT services. The next trigger is management commentary on future tariff hikes, postpaid adoption, 5G monetisation and capital expenditure requirements as data-centre investments increase. View: Improving ARPU and strong Africa performance support earnings momentum, but sustaining growth without significant subscriber losses will be the key metric to watch over the next few quarters. Disclosure: This post is for informational and educational purposes only and should not be construed as investment advice.