Bharti’s Sunil Mittal signals succession transition within a decade

Chairman of Bharti Enterprises, Sunil Bharti Mittal, is looking to hand over the reins to the next generation in a decade’s time, by which he expects promoter shareholding in Airtel to rise to above 51 per cent.

While briefly addressing the earnings call for the quarter ended March 2026, Mittal said he wanted promoter holding to be consolidated under Bharti Telecom, which has been the founding promoter company, and raise the promoter stake using the “twin levers” of buybacks and continued dividends.

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“If you really asked me, my own wish is that in the next decade, as I kind of come to a point where I hand over the reins to the next generation, as shareholders, Bharti Telecom should get back to a controlling shareholding of 51 per cent, or just over 50 per cent. So that’s 10 per cent more to go, and for a company of this magnitude and size, that is not a small task,” he said.

“The principal direction or vision that I carry in my mind is all shares that we can get from both ICIL or Bharti family entities, and SingTel should go into Bharti Telecom as much as possible,” he said.

Bharti Telecom should be the controlling promoter shareholder, which he said was not only the founding promoter but also mostly held a controlling shareholding of 51 per cent, he added.

Singapore-based SingTel, which has a direct stake of 7 per cent in Bharti Airtel, had 6 per cent more shareholding to sell for equalising its holding with Bharti Telecom.

Airtel’s board approved an increase in shareholding in Airtel Africa through a Rs 28,200 crore share-swap deal.

Sunil Mittal called out Indian IT companies for not growing beyond the cycles of dividends and buybacks and not acquiring companies in their own segments, a path that Airtel would not take.

He noted that while no international acquisition was on the table, taking Airtel’s overall customer base to over 800 million was not far.