 "Sunil Mittal, Chairman, Bharti Airtel")
Bharti Airtel Chairman Sunil Bharti Mittal on Thursday said the company was ready for a tariff hike and will not hesitate, provided it is joined by others.
“We will not hesitate to raise tariffs, but it cannot be done unilaterally. We are not asking for a massive increase in tariffs, but we have to be mindful of the market,” said Mittal, in an interaction with the media.
The latest tariff hike by the three operators happened in December 2019. Since then, Bharti Airtel has been making a case for tariff hikes. However, it is not ready to blink first.
Bharti Airtel Managing Director and Chief Executive Officer Gopal Vittal had said in the past that the tariffs needed to go up and the average revenue per user needed to be close to Rs 200.
Analysts believe that the case for a tariff hike may be further dampened after the announcement by Reliance Jio to unleash a cheap smartphone in the market on September 10.
Goldman Sachs in a report said, “For Jio to be able to capture a sizeable share of the 2G customer base, we believe it will need to be competitive on both device pricing (which should not be materially higher than feature phone average selling price) and tariffs (which will need to be in line with 2G tariffs). Without either of these, we think the traction on this smartphone could be limited, at least in the near term.”
Jio and Google will roll out one of the most affordable 4G smartphones on September 10, and expand their partnership to power 5G solutions in enterprise and consumer segments.
“The telecom industry is in a tremendous amount of stress. I hope the government and authorities focus on this issue and India’s digital dream remains intact through the three operators,” Mittal said after the OneWeb announcement.
Bharti-backed OneWeb, the Low Earth Orbit satellite communications company, announced the successful lift-off of another 36 satellites to mark the completion of its ‘Five to 50’ mission. With this major milestone, the company is on its way to deliver connectivity across the UK, Canada, Alaska, Northern Europe, Greenland, and the Arctic Region.
As far as investment plans in the satellite endeavour are concerned, Mittal said, “There were some advance conversations going on, which we had mentioned earlier. It is not a huge sum of money but some amount of money where we can have a more strategic participation from the right candidate at the shareholder table. Whatever has to be done will be done in July.”
He even added that the companies should be breaking even 24 months from the date of full commercial service.
