Telecom stocks gain up to 2.5 pc

Telecom stocks on Thursday gained up to 2.5 per cent after Bharti Airtel Chairman Sunil Bharti Mittal said the industry's average revenue per user (ARPU) is likely to go up.

Bharti Airtel rose 2.35 per cent to close at Rs 448.50 on the BSE. During the day, it jumped 4.15 per cent to Rs 456.40.

Shares of Vodafone Idea also rose by 2.49 per cent to Rs 6.58 at close of trade. During the day, it climbed 4.36 per cent to Rs 6.70.

"My view is Rs 200 ARPU is eventually going to Rs 300 ARPU... At the lower end, Rs 100 for a customer over a month of consuming rich data, voice and other services and on the upper end Rs 450-500... therefore, blended eventual landing point of Rs 300 a month, which will still be USD 4 a month... by far, the lowest anywhere in the world and yet consuming two or three times more data than anywhere else in the world," Mittal, chairman of Bharti Airtel, told reporters after a pre-Budget meeting between Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman and corporate leaders.

The industry needs to get to point where there is a balance between protecting investments and consumer interest, he said adding that Trai needs to work towards this as the sector "has not been able to have an orderly mechanism to get to that point".

The comments of the Airtel chief come just days after the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (Trai) initiated talks to prescribe floor price for call and data, and also deferred by one year the scrapping of the charge paid by mobile phone users for calls made to rival networks.

The two moves came as a big boost to Airtel and Vodafone Idea that are staring at a liability of thousands of crores in unpaid past statutory dues following a Supreme Court ruling.