GTPL Hathway plans capex of Rs 1400 crore over the next three years

The company plans to invest Rs 450-500 crore in capex each year. The capex will be equally divided between the cable TV and broadband businesses.

In FY23, GTPL Hathway’s capex stood at Rs 468.5 crore, with Rs 225 crore going into broadband and the rest into cable TV.

“We look forward to investing Rs 1400 crore in the next three years. We are keeping our capex at around Rs 450 crore to Rs 500 crore (annually). We did a capex of Rs 468.5 crore in FY23,” said Piyush Pankaj, GTPL Hathway’s chief strategy officer, at the company’s Q4 earnings call.

Pankaj said the company’s broadband capex was invested in growing home passes, acquiring new customers, and technology. In cable TV, the company is deploying capex to migrate customers from MPEG-2 to MPEG-4 technology, besides cable headend and acquiring/retaining customers.

Notwithstanding the over-the-top (OTT) onslaught, Pankaj is confident that the cable TV business will continue to grow and generate cash for the company.He said there are 100 million non-television households that can be brought into the pay-tv ecosystem. He also sees acquisition opportunities for the company, as a large part of the cable TV industry is still unorganised.Going forward, GTPL Hathway intends to converge cable TV, broadband, and OTT services under one umbrella, as the company’s pipe can be used to deliver multiple services.

“We have to combine those businesses together, combine those offerings, make it more lucrative for the customer, and increase our services,” he added.

In December 2022, GTPL Hathway launched an OTT aggregation service, GTPL Genie+, for its customers in partnership with over 15 streaming services.

Pankaj said the Genie+ service has onboarded 12,000 subscribers, including 8,000 from the broadband side and around 4,000 from the cable side.

He also asserted that the company has not seen any impact from JioCinema’s free Indian Premier League (IPL) offering.

In FY23, GTPL Hathway’s net profit dipped 43% to Rs 114.5 crore, while revenue increased 12% to Rs 2714 crore. The company has 8.95 million cable TV subscribers and 0.92 million broadband customers.