Recently, Bharti Airtel revealed that an average mobile user in India is consuming around 1049MB of data per month on its network. This was based on the full year (FY17) report released by Airtel. And today, Vodafone India has also released its full-year report for fiscal 2017. Similar to Airtel and Idea Cellular, Vodafone has also witnessed some huge changes in the mobile data segment.
According to the data released by Vodafone, the company’s data browsing revenue increased by 5% in FY17 and now stands at Rs. 8467 crores. Vodafone has added a total of 10 million broadband users during the entire year thereby closing at 37.7 million 3G/4G users.
Out of the total 66.9 million data users, only 43.5 million users consumer over 1MB data every month. When these users are taken into consideration, the average data consumed by a user per month stands at 970MB, which is less than what Airtel reported.
The data ARPU (average revenue per user) for users consuming data above 1MB has been reported to be Rs. 140 in the last quarter that ended March 31, 2017, which is down from Rs. 160 in the same quarter last year. Vodafone says that dip in the ARPU is due to the free data plans that were offered by the new entrant Reliance Jio.
Furthermore, the data usage growth led to the higher smartphone penetration at 35.5 percent of total customer base until March 31, 2017. Vodafone also claims that the company is driving data usage with innovative value propositions such as the SuperHour, SuperNet, and Vodafone Play.
Under the Vodafone SuperHour scheme, the firm is offering unlimited data for one complete hour at just Rs. 16 (varies depending on the circle). This scheme helped the network to retain the customers from porting out to other networks.
To get into the digital content segment, Vodafone came out with Vodafone Play to rival JioCinema, Airtel Movies, and Idea’s digital content services. Vodafone in the same press statement said that the Vodafone Play now consists of over 14,000 film titles and 150+ live TV channels. The application currently has crossed five million downloads in the Google Play Store and App Store. Vodafone has an exclusive partnership with Amazon Prime and Netflix to offer great value on content. These two solutions are helping Vodafone big time to stay in the competition.
