Hello and welcome to CNBC TV 18 special coverage here from Davos 2026. I'm Shireen Bhan. It's very hard to get this man to join us in our Davos studios, but we finally managed Sunil Mittal. What an absolute pleasure. Thank you very much for joining us here in Davos. Let me first start by asking you what the big takeaway is from that Trump address, what he had to say, the resetting of the global order, so to speak.
Well, I think there are many things that can be taken out of that speech. Some, you know, I would say prepared speech and rest a lot of rambling all over as you know, but I think what you take out of that is a new world order has been set. So now where it lands itself, we have to see. The direction is very clear, the old institutions are not working, at least especially for the US. They believe that they have been taken advantage of, despite being the richest nation in the world. So I don't know how to sort of balance that argument that they have been taken advantage of, yet they keep on becoming richer. In Trump's small gathering that we had yesterday, he said, 'I have since I've come everybody's become twice as rich if not more. I have made American business people more rich.' So in some sense he's acknowledging that America is getting the better deal out of the world, and yet he's complaining. But I mean that's who he is. He wants more for his people, more for his country. But I think what is most important out of this is some of the very close allies of US, Canada, Europe and many others recognize today that they are now not having the backing of US as they had before. And that would mean that Europe, Canada, many other countries will have to start thinking about themselves.
What about India in all of this and specifically India in response and relation to the US?
I think India is busy with doing many other things. EU deal is around the corner. I'm very hopeful that on the 27th, 26th, 27th something will be announced. Both sides have made early statements to say everything is looking in good shape. India has tied up with UK very very comprehensive FTA. Australia has done, New Zealand is done, Saudi is done, Saudi is about to be done, UAE is done, Qatar is done. Only piece that is left is US now. I think it will be done. My own view is there are some, you know, last minute negotiations and also some creases that have to be ironed out between the political leadership, but I think US needs to be reminded that for the last 10-15 years especially during Prime Minister Modi's term, India has leaned a lot towards the US. It has moved away from a lot of those people or those countries which America was not in favor of. Our relationship with China has changed. We started to move away even from Russia in some sense. You just can't throw this 10 years of work away by, you know, getting upset on one or two trade issues on some duty on something which is not delightful to a small constituency in the US. We have invested very heavily into this relationship. I am hopeful that better sense will prevail all around and we will come to a decent landing point. It may not be a 100% satisfactory outcome, but no deal is 100% perfect. You will get to a point where both nations will start to come closer.
Well, let's talk a little bit about business. I want to start by asking you about possible tariff hikes because the last time when we spoke in Davos, you'd spoken about an ARPU closer to 2020. We're now at 250. 300, are we already at 300? No. I said my wish has been, your wish has been 300. We're at 250 currently. But so tariff hike likely in the offing, even possible?
I think everybody agrees that a tariff repair is absolutely essential. There is no one, including the government, believes that you need to have a very robust, solid infrastructure supporting the digital dreams of India. For that, investments have to be regularly made, and we are not talking about investments for the faint-hearted. There are billions of dollars going every year into the network, into spectrum. Therefore, there's got to be a reasonable business case out there. 300 rupees is what I said eight or nine years back. I'm not even asking for adjustment of inflation, just in real terms 300 is still eluding us. Can we get there? It needs another 15-17% increase in tariffs or rearrangement of packs that are given out. For 200 bucks you're giving everything away just to win more market share is unsustainable. Something has to give, and we are seeing now from 12 operators we are down to two operators plus one which is trying to make a comeback. I personally believe time has come for this to be a crowdsourced event where the whole country can benefit from a very strong digital infrastructure highway in which everybody's contributing 20-30 rupees a month to consume ton of data and enjoy many services that they need for everyday life. So I think I'm hopeful that sometime in 26 we may yet come to that point of touching 300.
Come to the point of touching 300 in 26. But you talked about a comeback of the third player and now with this AGR uncertainty which was looming large over that particular player ending in a way or being resolved in a way, a game of three essentially, what could that mean?
We have always said 3+1 is good for India. It's a large country. World over you see two or three operators, but for a size of India, I think 3+1 is a good place and we are hoping that Vodafone Idea will start to, you know, be more active in the marketplace. They're welcome. There should be three operators. Keeps everybody, you know, in the right place from the customer point of view. And from our own standpoint, we are hoping, we've written to the government that AGR was our issue as well. And we hope we get attention from the government.
Have you heard from the government at all?
Not as yet. We heard from the minister yesterday. He mentioned that everybody needs to follow the route that Vodafone followed which is via the courts. But we still engage with the government. We just want to present our case to the government in terms especially around reassessment and recalculation. I think that's not a legal point. That's a, you know, mathematical point, a correction of errors, you know, manifest errors. We'll engage with the government first.
So what do you believe that reassessment could potentially mean if the government were to go through with that?
Well, they're going for Vodafone Idea in any case. I think for anybody, if the formula will be the same, if your paid money that has not been counted, if there are double billing that has come through, if all that is established, your base principle goes down and that has a cascading effect on penalty interest, on penalty, and the amount can come down significantly. So, and I don't think so any government would want to take more money than it is due. And our really case is what we are saying, take what is due. We are not asking for any concession but don't take more than what is due.
Don't take more than what is due and you haven't heard back from them on the plea reassessment just yet. But you know I want to understand from you what we can expect now as far as your capex plans are concerned. They have been moderating. What can we expect in light of this move to 6G and whether or not we are on the cusp of a 6G rollout as well. Give me a sense of what we should realistically expect.
You know, capex has not come down. 30,000 crores, and I'm not talking about spectrum, we are spending 30,000 crore, and I'm only talking about India, not Africa and other places. 30,000 crore is being spent in capex every year. It'll continue to be spent. If it is not 4G, it gets into 5G. If 5G is almost sort of tapering off, it's more fiber, it's more, you know, FWA, it is more data centers. So you'll continuously see about 30,000 crores, give or take a little bit. I would say little more than 30 then less than 30, that will be the order of magnitude. As to 6G, there are standards being still formed. I think we are few years away, but we don't produce technology, we use technology for the betterment of society, our people, the digital dream that we have. AI is solving a lot of problems that is really coming in a big way. We have been the leading operator around the globe in checking spam and fraud. Billions of messages and calls are being, you know, prevented, yet it's not complete, we are doing more there.
What kind of AI investments could we expect from you?
Well, on the data center, I would say definitely very large investments. You're doing a big data center for a large international client in Visakhapatnam. That's with Google. With Google, it'll double up our capacity from where we are today. We would like to get to 1 gigawatt of capacity as soon as we can. Would it take 3 to 4 years perhaps? But that is a, you know, big focus area, priority area for you. Data centers and sovereign cloud. I think we are also going very heavy on the sovereign cloud. All the enterprise cloud hosting should now start to come on to Indian platforms and Airtel, so cloud will be one such platform where we are combining with IBM, with Google and others but making it a sovereign cloud so that banks, other financial institutions...
When will that be a reality?
It's already a reality. We have already a few customers. Has been running his own on-prem cloud for a long time but we have already got some good marquee customers, not declaring them as yet but good wins have been had.
