With Bharti Airtel and Reliance Jio locked in competitors more than subscriber addition and Vodafone Idea constantly losing consumers for the previous handful of months, the prospects of any tariff hike by the telcos in the close to term has faded away.
The final tariff hike was accomplished by the 3 operators in December 2019 and 2020 will finish with no hike and at least the 1st quarter of calendar 2021 is also unlikely to see any hike, sector executives stated.
Some prospects of a restricted tariff hike was observed earlier this month when Vodafone Idea had hiked tariffs for two of its post-paid strategy by Rs 50 in the UP east circle. However, on closer examination it was identified that the company’s tariff in a single of the packs was decrease than Bharti’s and it closed this gap.
Vodafone had a Rs 749 per month post-paid strategy exactly where the value was raised to Rs 799, whilst in a further strategy of Rs 598, the value was hiked to Rs 649. It was assumed that Vodafone Idea which desperately requires to hike tariffs but is constrained due to the status quo position maintained by Bharti and Jio, might do slight tweaks in some post-paid plans in some circles.
The tweaks will aid the organization to test waters as there’s more stickiness in post-paid customers and might enhance its realisation.
The stance of Bharti and Jio on keeping status quo relating to tariffs continues. Bharti’s tariffs are about 15-20% at a premium to Jio’s and it can’t afford to hike tariffs till Jio does. Looking at subscriber addition trends for the final 3 months exactly where Bharti has been adding more customers than Jio, it is unlikely that Jio will raise tariffs at this point of time.
Bharti added 3.7 million subscribers on net basis in October (the final month for which Trai information is obtainable), as a result major for the third straight month and keeping its month-to-month pace of additions at 3-4 million more than the previous 4 months. Jio added 2.2 million subscribers for the month, marginally much better than 1.5 million in September but was nicely beneath its pre-Covid run-price. Jio’s VLR (active) subscribers trend shows additional weakness with net gains of just 1.1 million adding up to a base of 319.4 million, which is now marginally decrease than Bharti, which added 3 million to its VLR base.
If a single sees Vodafone Idea, it lost 2.7 million subscribers through October, a tad decrease than reduction of 4.7 million subscribers in the month prior to it.
In the 4G segment, Bharti continued to maintain its pace adding 4.2 million subscribers in October, considerably much better than Jio’s 2.2 million, whereas Vodafone Idea fared poorly right here adding .6 million.
On a 12-month basis Jio’s VLR subscriber industry share improved by 2.2 ppts y-o-y to 33.2% in October, whilst Bharti saw a marginally smaller sized uptick of 1.7 ppts on the identical metric through the provided period. Vodafone Idea saw a steady erosion of its subscriber base all through the year with its total and VLR subscriber share declining to 25% and 27% respectively.
Industry executives have stated that with Jio in race for subscriber addition with Bharti and as Jio also most likely to come out with a new variant of its 4G-function telephone, JioTelephone as nicely as its low-expense smartphone in partnership with Google, it is unlikely to go for a tariff hike in close to term which signifies that status quo would prevail.