Bharti Airtel remains a marquee buy idea, said Macquarie. However, the stock movement on Friday, June 17, was not reflective of the optimism exuded by Macquarie. At 12:48 IST, the telco's shares were trading 2 percent lower at Rs 640.85 on the BSE.

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The foreign brokerage firm has an 'outperform' call on shares of the telecom company with a target price of Rs 845. This implies an upside of 32 percent from the current level.

A lot of spectrum is available in 5G auctions with flexibility on payments, the brokerage added.

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Macquarie expects the telecom companies to focus on 8 and 3.3 GHz spectrum in dense urban areas. It said that average revenue per user (ARPU), earnings before interest tax depreciation and amortisation (EBITDA), earnings before interest tax (EBIT), cashflow growth, and deleveraging are catalysts for Bharti Airtel.

Earlier this week, CLSA said that even as it had a positive view of Reliance Industries, the brokerage firm's top pick in the sector was Bharti Airtel. This was because of the latter's 4G penetration at 62 percent of its own 326 million India mobile subscribers and growing ARPU.

CLSA, analysing the latest Telecom Regulatory Authority of India data, said that Bharti Airtel and Jio Infocomm saw sequential revenue market share (RMS) gains in the March quarter due to the hike in tariff prices announced by the telcos in November and December last year.

Bharti Airtel's RMS gain was the highest at 71 basis points (bps), taking it to 35.5 percent while Jio’s RMS gain was 37 bps, CLSA said.

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