India's Bharti Airtel buys airwaves worth $820 million in downbeat spectrum auction

By Kashish Tandon and Nikunj Ohri

BENGALURU/NEW DELHI (Reuters) -India's Bharti Airtel has spent 68.57 billion rupees ($820.80 million), the most among its peers, to acquire telecom spectrum at a government auction that ended on Wednesday, although their combined bids were well short of the amount on offer.

Overall, telecom companies bid for spectrum worth 113.40 billion rupees to acquire 141 megahertz (MHz) of airwaves, much lower than the 962.38 billion rupees worth of spectrum on offer, as was expected since firms were mainly looking to renew or shore up their holdings.

Bharti Airtel, the no.2 telecom operator by subscribers in the world's second-largest smartphone market, said it bought 97 MHz spectrum that was expiring this year and acquired additional spectrum to boost its mid-band holding, commonly used for 5G connectivity.

Reliance Industries unit Reliance Jio Infocomm, the top operator in the country, bought spectrum worth 9.74 billion rupees, while Vodafone Idea bought spectrum worth 35.1 billion rupees.

This year's auction was expected to be limited in scale compared with the last one in 2022 when 51.2 GHz of radio frequencies were sold for a record 1.5 trillion rupees, mainly as the 5G spectrum was on auction for the first time.

"As auction for 5G spectrum was held recently and 5G monetization is still in progress, no bidding took place in 800MHz, 2300MHz, 3300MHz and 26GHz bands," the telecom department said in a statement on Wednesday.

"We are looking at hopefully an aggressive rollout ... as that builds out, probably demand for spectrum in the 5G bands will also increase once the current amount of spectrum saturates," a government source told reporters.

A total of 10GHz in airwaves, ranging between 800 MHz and 26 gigahertz (GHz), were up for sale in this year's auction, which has been delayed twice.

($1 = 83.5400 Indian rupees)

(Reporting by Nikunj Ohri and Sarita Chaganti Singh in New Delhi; additional reporting by Hritam Mukherjee in Bengaluru; Editing by Mrigank Dhaniwala, Savio D'Souza and Sohini Goswami)