Macquarie has turned bullish on Bharti Airtel, upgrading its call on the telecom service provider to ‘Outperform’ while raising its target price on the stock by ₹350.

The new target price is a 10% premium over the stock’s closing price on Wednesday, August 14.

Macquarie expects the company’s Return on Invested Capital (ROIC) to improve from 10% to 18-20% by the financial year 2028.

Macquarie has reaffirmed its constructive earnings and deleveraging thesis on the New Delhi-based telecom major. It also sees India’s mobile target EV-EBITDA multiple getting lifted to a multiple of 12.5 from 11.
As the base case, the brokerage firm assumes a further growth of 10-15% increase in mobile for the financial year 2026-2027, that is from ₹205 in FY24 to an estimated ₹290-300 in FY27, though with only a mild subscriber growth of 2% for the period.

Shares of Bharti Airtel traded flat in the afternoon session on Friday, up 1.05% at ₹1,487.2 per piece on the BSE at 1:10 pm.

The company posted a more than double net profit in the June quarter of the financial year 2024–25, beating the Street’s estimate. The sharp rise in net profit came on the back of new user additions, increasing data consumption and an exceptional one-time gain.

Its net profit jumped sharply to ₹4,160 crore in the reporting period and surpassed a CNBC-TV18 poll estimate of ₹3,620 crore, compared to a net profit of ₹2,071.6 crore in the same period last year.

The telecom firm’s revenue in the quarter rose to ₹38,506.4 crore, slightly higher than the CNBC-TV18 poll estimate of ₹38,500 crore. The telco had posted a revenue of ₹37,599 crore in Q1 FY24. Its EBITDA dipped almost a per cent lower than the poll estimate of ₹20,096 crore to ₹19,944 crore in Q1 FY25 from ₹19,590.5 crore in the year-ago period.

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