Bharti Airtel CEO sat down for the quarterly earnings call today and revealed some of the major insights into what the company is planning for the upcoming quarters, some of its partnerships, and how it has been able to ramp up its ARPU ahead of the other telcos. Gopal Vittal said that some of the recent tweaks made in the plans of Bharti Airtel, both on the prepaid and postpaid front, were a small step in the direction of pushing up the Average Revenue Per User (ARPU) of the company to Rs 200 levels and eventually to the Rs 300 levels. He said that currently, the industry ARPU is in the unsustainable ranges, and the return on capital for the company is in a single-digit figure.
Changes in Prepaid and Postpaid Plans
One of the major changes is the upping of the lower limit of the prepaid plans for Bharti Airtel subscribers. The telecom company has recently removed its Rs 49 prepaid plan from its list of plans; this means that the subscribers opting for the bare minimum plan will have the option of a Rs 79 prepaid plan instead of the previous Rs 49 plan. Not only this but a slight change has been made on the postpaid plan front apart from the introduction of the Airtel Black postpaid plans. The corporate plans, which used to have a starting price point of Rs 199, will now start from Rs 299. So, there has been an increase of Rs 100 on the corporate postpaid plans front in favour of the ARPU.
Bharti Airtel CEO Explains High Capex
The Bharti Airtel CEO also said that the increased Capex of Bharti Airtel was because of the deployment of the sub-GHz spectrum. He also added Airtel is deploying new radios in seven circles where it did not have a sub-Ghz layer. In four other circles, he said that Airtel had upgraded the software to provide 4G services on the Sub-GHz spectrum.
