The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) has just released its report for the quarterly performance of the telecom sector for the QE March 31, 2022. It can be seen that the average revenue per user (ARPU) for wireless services went up by 11.40 QoQ because of the tariff hikes implemented in late 2021. This isn’t a surprise as all the telcos have already reported the increase in ARPU they saw during the last quarter of FY22. From Rs 114.16 in QE December 2021, the ARPU jumped to Rs 127.17 in QE March 2022. On a YoY basis, the monthly ARPU went up for wireless services by 22.77% during the quarter.
Prepaid ARPU Went Up, But Postpaid ARPU Sees a Decline
Prepaid ARPU per month went up from Rs 107.98 in Q3 FY22 to Rs 121.91 in Q4 FY22. At the same time, Postpaid ARPU went down to Rs 200.56 in Q4 FY22 compared to the previous quarter’s Rs 210.33. It looks like people are spending lesser on postpaid mobile services now. The Gross Revenue (GR) and the Adjusted Gross Revenue (AGR) for March 2022 quarter was Rs 76,387 crore and Rs 58,886 crore, respectively. This meant that the GR and AGR went up by 9.60% and 6.77% QoQ. TRAI said that the YoY growth in the GR and AGR in QE March 2022 over the same quarter last year was 14.38% and 21.20%. Higher revenues are also a result of prepaid tariff hikes to the tune of 25% by the previous telcos in the December 2021 quarter. But this also meant that the license fees went up from Rs 4541 crore in December 2021 quarter to Rs 4712 crore in March 2022 quarter. The total number of internet subscribers also went down during the quarter. From 829.30 million users at the end of December 2021, the internet subscribers fell down to 824.89 million users at the end of the March 2022 quarter. Out of the total 824.29 million internet users, the wired internet users were only 27.7 million, while the wireless internet subscribers were 797.61 million subscribers.
