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Bharti Airtel now earns ₹271 a month from the average mobile user in India, up from ₹256 a year ago. The same user is now getting through 36.5 GB of data a month, against 28.3 GB a year earlier. Airtel’s September-quarter results, released on 5 November, show that people are paying more each month but getting a lot more data for it.

Mobile communications tower with antennas against a clear blue sky

The ₹271 number

ARPU, or average revenue per user, is the figure telecom companies watch most closely. Airtel’s India mobile ARPU was ₹271 in the July-September quarter. That is up from ₹264 in the June quarter and ₹256 in the same quarter last year, a rise of 5.9 per cent, according to Business Standard and TelecomLead.

The rise showed up in profit. Airtel’s consolidated net profit was ₹8,887 crore, up 31 per cent from ₹6,791 crore a year earlier, Business Standard reported. Revenue from operations was ₹60,878 crore, according to Upstox and TelecomLead. India mobile revenue grew 10.1 per cent.

Business Standard reported that the profit still fell short of analysts’ estimates because network costs went up, while revenue and operating profit beat expectations. Network operation and maintenance costs rose 11 per cent to ₹11,214 crore.

More data per rupee

The bigger shift is in how much data people use. Business Standard reported that average data use per customer in India was 36.5 GB, up 28.8 per cent from 28.3 GB. WCRC Leaders gives the same 36.5 GB figure as a monthly average.

Put the two numbers together and each gigabyte is getting cheaper. By PBTrendz’s rough calculation, ₹271 spread across 36.5 GB works out to about ₹7.4 per GB, down from about ₹9 a year ago. That is revenue per GB across all of Airtel’s mobile revenue, not the price of any one plan.

Airtel had 304.6 million smartphone data customers, about 80 per cent of its mobile base, Business Standard reported. Its India mobile base was 377.2 million, up 3.6 per cent, according to TelecomLead. Prepaid users still make up 91.7 per cent of that base.

Postpaid up, broadband bills down

Airtel added a record 1.2 million postpaid customers in the quarter, taking that base past 31.2 million. “Our postpaid momentum remained strong with record-high net customer additions of 1.2 million,” said Gopal Vittal, Executive Vice-Chairman, as quoted by Business Standard.

Home broadband grew too. Airtel added 676,000 homes in the quarter and now has 15.37 million broadband customers, up 28.9 per cent in a year, according to TelecomLead.

But the average home broadband customer is paying less. TelecomLead reports homes ARPU of ₹509, down from ₹534 a year earlier and ₹523 in the June quarter. Airtel is signing up homes quickly, but the average bill per home is going down.

Where the money goes

Airtel spent ₹12,467 crore on capital expenditure in the quarter, including ₹9,908 crore in India. Separately, it paid ₹2,826 crore for a land parcel for data-centre expansion, according to Business Standard and Upstox.

Vittal called the purchase “another important step towards realising our ambition of building 1 GW of data centre capacity”, WCRC Leaders reported. The company had said in March that it has about 300 MW of capacity today.

Some numbers moved the wrong way. India mobile monthly churn, the share of users who leave each month, rose to 2.9 per cent from 2.6 per cent in the June quarter. Airtel’s DTH business lost about 443,000 customers in the quarter, with monthly churn at 3.5 per cent, according to TelecomLead.

What to watch

The gap with Reliance Jio is the first thing to watch. Business Standard put Jio’s ARPU at ₹218.8, more than ₹50 below Airtel’s, while Jio had 542.2 million subscribers against Airtel’s 498.6 million in India and South Asia.

The second is churn. If more users keep leaving each month, ARPU growth will be harder to sustain. The third is whether the data-centre plan turns the land purchase into real capacity, and how quickly. For users, the per-GB cost is still falling even as the monthly figure goes up.