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Highlights
- Bharti Airtel, the second-largest telecom operator in India, has been benefiting from its premium strategy.
- The telco has yielded healthy average revenue per user (ARPU) growth due to that.
- Airtel has been benefiting from the premium approach, but it is still asking for a tariff repair in the industry.
Andrew Bonwick
Vice President of Product Development at Relm Insurance
Madhav Sheth
CEO of Ai+ Smartphone
Stephen Rose
CEO Render Networks
Bharti Airtel, the second-largest telecom operator in India, has been benefiting from its premium strategy. The telco has yielded healthy average revenue per user (ARPU) growth due to that. The strategy for pushing prepaid users to postpaid, feature phone users to smartphones, maximising data monetisation, and expanding international roaming penetration has helped Airtel in boosting ARPU, said JM Financial.
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Airtel has been benefiting from the premium approach, but it is still asking for a tariff repair in the industry. The ARPU growth has been phenomenal for Airtel for the last few years. However, if we zoom out and focus on the short-term, then you will see that Airtel has not really seen much growth in ARPU.
Airtel reported an ARPU of Rs 257 for FY26 ending. However, in the previous quarter, this was Rs 259. So sequentially, there was a dip. Even if it was due to less number of days in February, but it still would have largely stayed flat, even with more days in the quarter. Thus, Airtel will want a tariff repair as fast as possible.
Previous Tariff Hike
In the previous tariff hike, the telcos removed a lot of their annual plans, and also raised the tariffs by 12-15% for most of their plans. Some plans got even a higher percentage of hike. The last hike came in July 2024. Thus, it has already been two years now. We expect the next round of hikes or tariff structure changes in the near future. This is especially going to affect the IPO (intiail public offering) of Reliance Jio. Jio has already filed the DRHP (Draft Red Herring Prospectus) with the Securities Exchange Board of India (SEBI). The listing is expected within this financial year (FY27). The next round of tariff hikes will help Jio in boosting its ARPU and it will make a major impact on the telco’s financials.
