Summary

  • Hexacom renewed its Indus transaction authority in August 2026 at Rs 2,000 crore a year. The limit covers several kinds of business, not a single rental price or a promise to spend the full amount.
  • Filings disclose transaction costs and a comparison with unrelated suppliers' rents. They also separate the annual permission from the earlier Rs 1,134.1-crore tower-sale proposal. The remaining questions concern those comparisons and their application, not whether any documents exist.

The antennas stay where they are

A mobile operator can change a budget at a meeting. Moving its network to different towers is another matter. Fibre routes, power supplies, coverage and long contracts make the existing sites valuable well beyond the steel itself. In its 2025 shareholder notice, Bharti Hexacom explained that switching sites could disrupt service, bring early surrender fees and require changes to backhaul links.

That helps explain why its shareholders are regularly asked to approve business with Indus Towers. It does not tell them what each tower should cost.

On 20 August 2025, Hexacom shareholders approved transactions with Indus of up to Rs 2,200 crore per financial year. The permission lasted until the next annual meeting, subject to a fifteen-month maximum. Mentioning two financial years did not make it a licence to spend through both in full.

The next meeting has already happened. On 11 August 2026, shareholders renewed the authority at Rs 2,000 crore a year, running to the 2027 annual meeting, again with a fifteen-month maximum. The new notice calls it a renewal. A lower maximum does not establish a rent cut, fewer occupied towers or a smaller actual bill.

A very large yes — to a particular question

The 2026 resolution received 66,146,683 votes in favour and 152 against: 99.9998% support. The voting record records no promoter-group votes and says related parties abstained. This was not Airtel using its controlling stake to vote its own terms through.

The distinction matters because both Hexacom and Indus are Airtel subsidiaries. Their common parent has an interest on both sides of the commercial relationship; the outside shareholders of each business do not necessarily have the same interests. The approval process is meant to address that tension. It is not a substitute for examining the terms.

The previous vote was less comfortable. The official 2025 result records 88.2892% in favour and 11.7108% against, rather than an unexplained mixture of abstentions and invalid votes. Promoter-group votes were zero then too. The table does not identify which holders cast the dissenting votes.

Neither tally is a verdict on every rental charge. Shareholders authorised a maximum amount across services, reimbursements and asset-related transactions. Contracts still contain the rates, annual increases, site premiums and service obligations.

The sale that belongs in a different column

A second number has made this story unnecessarily confusing: Rs 1,134.1 crore. It concerned a proposed sale of roughly 3,400 Hexacom towers and related infrastructure to Indus, not the recurring annual permission.

The February 2025 postal-ballot notice describes that proposed business transfer, subject to closing adjustments. The annual report records approval on 16 March 2025, then says the sale was in abeyance after Telecommunications Consultants India Limited, or TCIL, requested a fresh process compatible with its public-sector requirements.

The contemporary PTI report carried by ETTelecom is explicit: a company spokesperson said the August 2025 resolution did not include that sale. Its web address mentions Rs 1,134 crore; the article itself explains the distinction. A URL is a poor substitute for reading the account beneath it.

Nor was the proposal unsupported by any external valuation. The company published a Grant Thornton Bharat LLP valuation and associated certification file. That establishes that a valuation was commissioned and disclosed, not that TCIL agreed with it or that its conclusions are beyond challenge. The historical hold also does not establish the sale's present status. The documents examined here do not establish a later completion.

What went through the account

The 2026 notice provides a more useful starting point than comparing a ceiling with one quarter's revenue. It lists Rs 1,408.2 crore of actual Hexacom transactions with Indus in FY2025-26: Rs 878.7 crore for services, Rs 514.5 crore of reimbursements and Rs 15 crore involving assets or equipment. Those figures include applicable GST; services supplied in the other direction round to zero.

The mixture matters. Paying for power is not the same business as selling a tower. The notice also explains why its total differs from the related-party amount in the financial statements: accounting for right-of-use assets and lease liabilities under Ind AS 116. A different total need not mean money has gone missing.

There is evidence about rents too. In its FY2026-27 memorandum, B S R & Co. LLP compares Indus's charges with rates Hexacom agreed with unrelated infrastructure suppliers. It concludes that the rental rates are similar and meet arm's-length criteria. Energy costs, it says, should pass through at actual cost without a markup.

That is a more substantial test than a shareholder vote alone. It is not a guarantee. B S R relies on information and comparability confirmations supplied by management and says it did not audit or verify the supplied information. The published Indus section does not reproduce the numerical, site-by-site rental comparison. For bandwidth and other telecom services supplied in the reverse direction, the memorandum says relevant comparable data were unavailable and recommends competitive market pricing. Those are different levels of support, not one blanket certificate for every transaction.

Look at the business, not just the permission

Indus's June 2026 quarter release reports consolidated revenue of Rs 8,431 crore and an EBITDA margin of 53.6%. Its operating table shows 267,611 macro towers, 432,250 co-locations and an average sharing factor of 1.62. There is enough operating information to begin examining the business; none of those figures isolates Hexacom's rent or payment behaviour.

Ownership is no longer an open question left over from the 2019 merger report or Airtel's announced 4.7% purchase in 2022. The current quarterly report records the merger's completion in November 2020, Indus becoming Airtel's subsidiary in November 2024 and Vodafone shareholders' exit that December. Old announcements explain the route taken, not the present destination.

For an outside shareholder, the next useful question is quite ordinary: what was paid for comparable service, and what was received? The annual ceiling tells the company how much business it may undertake. The invoices, service terms and collections tell a different, more revealing story.

Other earlier references are Businessworld and MSN; those pages were not independently accessible for this review. Also retained for reference are Indus's former results address, now returning an error, and Airtel's annual-report portal. The dated filings linked above support this account. See also the Indus Towers directory entry Only for Strategic Circle.