Bharti Airtel was forced to slash its data price by half to about Rs 60 per GB in the April to June period of 2017, the latest numbers revealed.
In contrast, Bharti Airtel was charging around Rs 125 per GB in the three months from January to March of this year. A year ago, it was charging about Rs 220 per GB.
ELASTICITY
Because of the lower prices, the usage of data on its network increased at an unprecedented pace.
On average, a single data subscriber consumed 2.6 GB of data during the latest period, compared to 1.3 GB in the period from January to March.
[polldaddy poll=9795630]This meant that despite the company halving its data price, it was still able to generate almost the same amount of money from its users as before.
The average revenue generated by a single data customer only slipped by 4% to Rs 156 per month from Rs 162 per month in the previous three months.
Moreover, the drop in prices seems to have attracted more of its customers to come back to Airtel.
The company, which was seeing millions of customers ditch it in favor of Reliance Jio’s data services, was able to report a growth of 6.2 mln users in the three months to June, taking the 3G+4G customers to 48.9 mln.
It should be noted that at 48.9 mln, Bharti Airtel still has only about half the wireless broadband customers that Reliance Jio has.
All the action the data front also resulted in the company’s total data traffic shooting through the roof.
The total data traffic on Bharti Airtel’s network more than doubled in the three months, going from about 224 mln GBs in the previous quarter to 470 mln GBs in the latest period.
VOICE
There was also some impact on the voice services.
The average price of voice calls fell 10% in the latest quarter to 22 paise per minute.
Because of this, Bharti Airtel now gets more money from data than from voice on a per-user, average basis.
The average revenue from a single voice customer was just Rs 111 per month, while the average revenue from a single data customer was 156 per month.
The average voice revenue per customer fell 2.5% during the quarter.