Airtel says prepaid plan tweaks are only a trial, calls for industry-wide shift in data pricing to lift ARPU

New Delhi: Bharti Airtel Friday told analysts its prepaid tweaks are only a trial run, and that sustained growth in average revenue per user - a key growth metric - will need a sector-wide shift in how data is priced.

Asked on the Q2 FY27 earnings call whether its August intervention was a step towards fixing the industry's pricing architecture, Shashwat Sharma, managing director of Bharti Airtel, said the problem was structural. The sector, he said, has "a very flat architecture and very low ARPUs."

"You're giving away unlimited usage, and you're not monetising consumption in a way. Data in that sense is not charged properly." The withdrawal of the ₹299 plan move, he said, was "more of an experimentation on our own base to keep moving ARPUs up," while "the architecture correction is a much broader correction that is required in the industry."


Airtel's India mobile ARPU rose to ₹271 from ₹264, helped by premiumisation and an extra day in the quarter. Sharma said the Q2 prepaid action had "already kind of paid out," with postpaid upgrades, international roaming and top-ups as the next levers.

Data usage per user, an analyst noted, is closing the gap with peers to 20-odd percent. Sharma said heavy users must contribute more, "People who consume heavily must pay for data proportionately, and that is the shift the industry eventually will have to make." Doing so would give "organic growth of ARPU, which is consumption-led," and "a pivotal shift that we need to make."

Sharma attributed higher churn to seasonality and tariff actions, which bring "a temporary impact on customer continuity." Interestingly, Airtel reintroduced the ₹299 plan that it had withdrawn in August, which had effectively increased the entry price for daily data plans to ₹349.