Bharti Airtel’s Sunil Mittal Says ARPUs Need To Increase By Rs 100 Per Month
Indian consumers have been enjoying very low rates and they’ll continue to do so, Mittal said.
Sunil Bharti Mittal, chairman of Bharti Airtel Ltd., said average revenue per user needs to go up by Rs 100 per month.
“Indian consumers have been enjoying very low rates. They’ll continue to enjoy low rates,” Mittal told reporters after a pre-Budget meeting with Finance Minister Nirmal Sitharaman. “But we need to have a balance between requirement of investments and the consumer on the other side.”
Earlier this month, the telecom operator announced new prepaid plans with calls and data tariffs higher by up to 42 percent.
The costlier prepaid plans come against the backdrop of the Supreme Court judgment on adjusted gross revenue, which battered the operator’s financials in the second quarter of the ongoing fiscal. The company reported a loss of Rs 23,045 crore in the quarter ended September as it provided for dues pending to the government-related dispute.
“My view is Rs 200 ARPU eventually going to Rs 300 ARPU,” he said. “At the lower end, Rs 100 for a customer over a month of consuming rich data voice and other services and the Rs 450-550 on the upper end.”
“Therefore, the blended eventual landing point (would be) Rs 300 per month, which will still be $4 a month—by far the lowest anywhere in the world and yet consuming three or four times more data than anywhere else in the world,” Mittal said. “That’s the balance we need to get to—TRAI needs to work on this because the industry has to be able to have an orderly mechanism to get to that point.”