Sanjay Singh / New Delhi
Further mounting the burden on consumers, India’s leading telecom company, Bharti Airtel has cut the grace period of free incoming for its prepaid mobile users from 15 days to seven days, amidst stiff competition in telecom sector and telcos coming up with predatory pricing and new ways to keep incur profits.
The reduction in grace period post the validity expiry date will make it mandatory for Airtel prepaid users to recharge their prepaid connection to ensure that their incoming calls don’t get stopped. The telecom industry moving towards this is aimed at increasing its Average Revenue Per User (ARPU). Other telecom operators are also likely to follow the footsteps of Bharti Airtel.
While this change in the minimum recharge scheme and reduced validity could help Bharti Airtel raise its ARPU, but at the same time, it may also lead to losing of its subscribers. Reliance Jio has now been overtaken by Bharti Airtel, as it has gained more subscribers, followed by Vodafone.
In October last year, Bharti Airtel and Vodafone Idea both has scrapped all its popular talk time recharges and instead introduced a new recharge scheme named — minimum recharge. By doing this, Bharti Airtel prepaid users now have to recharge every month, which will help ensure much bigger push to Bharti’s ARPU. This will also help Bharti Airtel and Vodafone Idea to take on Reliance Jio, which has been practising the same for long and has remained profitable.
Both Bharti Airtel and Vodafone Idea have a large number of inactive subscribers, which are not generating any revenue for these telecom companies. Telcos have earlier stated that they now want to focus on the customers who generate revenue for the company.