Bharti Airtel is looking to boost market share by expanding its operations to rural India. Indian telcos have made a majority of their investments in urban cities and towns to ensure they get a decent return. With low tariffs and small market size, it didn't make a lot of sense for operators to expand into rural India aggressively. But now, in a bid to boost the subscriber market share, Bharti Airtel is eyeing to expand into 60000 potential villages where it can serve consumers 4G services.
While talking about the themes that Airtel is building the future around, Gopal Vittal, CEO of Bharti Airtel, said, " In 60,000 high potential villages Airtel is just not present. Now we could have gone there earlier, but today I think the time is right for us to expand into these areas. This expansion will provide a fair market share and provide tailwind to the business. We are doing a lot of sophisticated data science to decide which are the places that we really need to rollout."
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As per Vittal, Airtel is very calculative about where it does business. So if it is a village they are rolling out services to, then they have already identified that it can potentially generate profits for them. Airtel wants to expand into rural areas to win the share of smartphones and add more active paying subscribers.
Vittal added, "In these 60,000 high potential villages, we have identified roughly 40,000 high potential clusters of communities, because for us it is really important that an individual town is profitable and revenue accretive, and therefore these clusters of communities or where the community of interest is, and it is not just an island that we look at, but we look at where the traffic is moving, where population is disbursed in order to maximize the revenue that we earn."
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Airtel's Wireless Subscriber Market Share and 5G
According to the data published by the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI), Airtel's market share at the end of December 31, 2022, in the wireless subscriber segment, was 32.16%.
When we talk about 5G, Airtel has already rolled out 5G to close to 113 cities and will expand to more cities by the end of March 2023. The telco is offering 5G at no additional cost to the 4G consumers. What's worth noting here is that Airtel would also be able to upgrade its 4G networks in the rural areas to 5G with the requirement of lower number of sites as it is deploying 5G NSA (non-standalone).
