Airtel's boss to make way for new CEO in 2026

The CEO of India's second-largest operator is stepping aside.

Bharti Airtel's Gopal Vittal will hand over the reins to Shashwat Sharma, Airtel's current chief operating officer (COO), in January 2026.

In its recent quarterly results, Airtel revealed that Vittal will assume the role of executive vice chairman of the company in addition to being the managing director. He will mentor Sharma before he takes over as CEO and MD in early 2026, while Vittal will continue as executive vice chairman.

Vittal has spearheaded the company through several challenges in his stint of over a decade. Here are his key achievements.

Fighting the Goliath

One of the biggest challenges faced by Airtel in the last decade was the launch of Mukesh Ambani-led Reliance Jio Infocomm. The company launched 4G services in September 2016 and offered free services for the first six months. This was followed by rock-bottom tariffs, which not only led to a price war but also triggered consolidation in the industry. Over the next four years, the number of telcos reduced from around 12-13 per circle (service area) to just six by March 2020.

While Airtel was able to survive these ructions, its average revenue per user (ARPU) came down from 233 Indian rupees (US$2.76) in September 2016 to just INR114 ($1.35) in March 2017, which was six months after Jio's launch. It bounced back to INR162 ($1.92) in September 2020. 

It was only in 2020 that a bruised Airtel returned to profitability after a backbreaking price war with Jio. Vittal is credited with engineering Airtel's shift in focus from the number of subscribers to "winning quality customers," which helped in it return to profitability. This also led to the focus on postpaid customers, who tend to be not just more loyal but also spend more. Airtel successfully transitioned from 3G to 4G and now to 5G under Vittal's stewardship.

Saying it like it is 

Over the years, soft-spoken but forthright Vittal has highlighted the regulatory challenges several times. He pointed to "consistent and enabling policy environment" as the most important marker of the industry's health in 2019 when it was facing the Interconnect Usage Charge (IUC) issue, which led to a face-off with arch-rival Reliance Jio. IUC is the cost paid by one operator to another when a call made from its network ends on another operator's network.

The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) announced plans to phase out IUC by 2020 to encourage the adoption of new technologies, such as VoIP. Jio was in favor of IUC removal, while the incumbent telcos, Bharti Airtel and Vodafone, opposed it. Jio benefitted from the removal of IUC since it was a new player and a significant number of calls from its network were ending on incumbent telcos' networks. However, TRAI extended the IUC beyond 2020 and cut the rate to INR0.06 ($0.0007) per minute, which was strongly criticized by Airtel at the time.

Apart from IUC, adjusted gross revenue (AGR) was another policy issue faced by Airtel during Vittal's tenure. This controversy revolved around whether revenue from non-telecom sources should be included in AGR, which was crucial as telcos needed to pay a percentage of it to the government. In October 2019, the Supreme Court ruled that telcos must include revenue from non-telecom sources, pushing them into massive debt as they were now required to pay AGR dues for several years.

In recent times, Vittal has spoken candidly about challenges associated with 5G monetization. "The architecture of pricing in India is quite broken because people who can afford to pay a lot more are paying a lot less simply because of these unlimited plans, which are like effectively a one-size-fits-all plan," he said earlier this year. 

…And the misses 

One of the areas where Vittal could have taken a more aggressive position is fostering a culture of innovation in the company. As the largest service provider (when he took over in 2013), Airtel didn't do enough to innovate and emerge as a technology leader. While Airtel adopted a conservative approach, Jio has developed its indigenous 5G stack, which it is looking to sell in the global market. 

 Another miss for Airtel was ignoring fixed broadband even when there was strong evidence of latent demand for data and connectivity in the country. This became crucial after the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic when there was a sudden surge in the number of home broadband users as lockdowns and work-from-home became a way of life.

Another controversy related to Airtel was the net neutrality issue in 2014-15. Airtel announced in 2014 that it will charge extra for VoIP services, which led to backlash and triggered a net neutrality debate in the country. The company had to finally withdraw this.