Bharti Airtel, the second-largest telecom operator, has not been able to grow its average revenue per user (ARPU) impactfully for a few quarters now. Yes, while Airtel's ARPU is already the highest in the industry by a huge margin, but its revenue growth would slow down if the ARPU doesn't go up in the coming quarters. This begs the question - will there be another round of tariff hikes soon? Because apart from that, Airtel has no other way to materially boost its ARPU significantly.
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The telco's ARPU in Q3 FY25 was Rs 245. In six months, the ARPU has only gone up by Rs 5. This is not something that would sit well for Airtel in the long-run. The telco would be planning currently to boost its ARPU. How will it exactly do that without tariff hikes is something we don't know. While the mobile revenues in India are growing and postpaid subscribers are also growing in healthy numbers, the telco's ARPU won't go up without tariff hikes.
Airtel's management has previously talked about how they would want to go about tariff hikes. We have covered that in the article below.
Read More - What Will the Next Tariff Hike in India Look Like
For now, to boost revenues further, the telco is trying to add as many homes customer as possible. In the homes business, as per Opensignal, Airtel has been able to deliver a better experience than Jio in almost all the key experiences. This, Opensignal explained, is because Airtel's networks are less congested compared to Jio's. While Jio has more than 6 million FWA customers, Airtel's count is only beyond a million. Airtel is also looking to deploy 5G SA in the near future to compete in experience with Jio.
