Bharti Airtel, a prominent player in the Indian telecom market, has been working really hard to ensure that it catches up to Reliance Jio’s market share as fast as possible. The company enjoys calling itself the ‘premium’ player in the market. While Jio looks out for adding as many subscribers as possible, Airtel wants high average revenue per user (ARPU) customers. According to a PTI report, much recently, Sunil Bharti Mittal, Chairman of Bharti Airtel, said India’s telecom industry is not in good health. Mittal said that calling the industry in not good health would be an ‘understatement’ at the end of the day.
Bharti Airtel Would Increase Tariffs in a Heartbeat
Mittal said Bharti Airtel wouldn’t ‘hesitate’ in increasing the tariffs for the users. But he added that Airtel wouldn’t do it alone. It makes sense since if Airtel were to be the lone operator going for tariff hikes, it would lose much of its market share to both Reliance Jio and Vodafone Idea. Mittal said that he hopes the government will take a look at the industry’s health and come up with necessary solutions to ensure that India’s digital dream doesn’t receive any harm. Mittal was speaking at the virtual event of OneWeb when he said that the government must ensure provisions are made to keep India at least a three market player. According to him, if the industry’s health is not good, it would severely impact the 5G rollouts. As per Mittal, the industry should be aiming to bring back the same tariffs that used to be years back. He said that the return on capital even by the best operator in the industry is in single digits, which is not a good sign. All the telecom operators are expected to raise tariffs sometime soon. There’s no saying who will do it first, but looking at the market situation, it should be Vodafone Idea. But that would risk Vi losing more of its subscribers, and the telco has only started adding them; thus it won’t make sense to do it alone and do it first for the telco. Hopefully, the Indian Telecom industry can see great support from the government in the coming months.
