A CRISIL study on Friday revealed that Bharti Airtel has been proactively focusing on improving employee support and engagement and is planning to moderate its employee attrition rate via career planning initiatives and by consolidating its position in the industry. This comes after a Delhi-based telco had provided proper life insurance and medical reimbursement for its employees owing to the Covid-19 pandemic. The company’s employees have been given access to a panel of doctors, oxygen concentrators and hospital bed wherever they are available via Covid Care. Additionally, it also rolled out a vaccination program for its employees, their dependents and associates, the study highlighted. According to the rating agency, Bharti Airtel now has over 14,000 employees in India and a customer base of 417 million on a worldwide basis. The Sunil Mittal-owned Telco, as per the rating agency, should focus on improving value creation for its shareholders which has been ‘subpar’ in the last few years due to competitive disruption, adverse regulatory outcomes, and Capex-intensive nature of the business. A statement from the rating agency reads that over the previous five fiscals all the way up to April 2021, the annualised return to shareholders stood at 11.2% compared with 13.8% for the Nifty index. However, the company outperformed the Nifty index in the past two fiscals by providing investors with an annualised return of 30% compared with 13% for the Nifty index. The company is now restructuring businesses to enhance shareholder value.
What Do We Know About the New Structure
Under this new corporate structure, Bharti Airtel will intend to hold all the digital assets, whilst the telecom businesses will be moved into a newly created unit that will be called Airtel Limited. Until recently, Bharti Airtel had been housing the Indian telecom business, whilst all of the digital assets had been under Airtel Digital. Bharti Telemedia had been holding international operations including Airtel Africa, payments bank, data centre under Nxtra, Indus Towers and its DTH business. Furthermore, under this new structure, Bharti Airtel will intend to house all of its digital assets, with it becoming a holding company of separate units of the telecom business under Airtel, its Payments Bank, international businesses such as Airtel Africa and the infrastructure business that was part of Nxtra and Indus, as had been reported by ET Telecom. Post the assessment, CRISIL has assigned the ‘GVC Level 1’ to Bharti Airtel Ltd, which indicates corporate governance practices and value creation at the company for all its stakeholders are at their current highest.
