Telcos will further slash tariffs this year to keep their market share, predicts Crisil Research

KOLKATA: India’s biggest incumbent carriers – Bharti Airtel, Vodafone India and Idea Cellular --will continue to engage in a fierce price war with Reliance Jio Infocomm even at the risk of severely dented bottom-lines in FY18 simply to hold on to their market leadership, analysts at Crisil Research said.

“At least, two out of the top three telcos will bleed in FY18, but competition will only heat up further as market leadership is always worth bleeding for,” Ajay Srinivasan, Crisil Research director tracking the telecom sector, told ET.

He declined to name the telcos on confidentiality grounds. Global research, he said, suggests that a market leader not only commands superior profitability and returns but also enjoys pricing power, a higher share of sticky postpaid customers and lower churn.


Small wonder, Srinivisan expects the price war in India’s Rs 1.5 lakh crore wireless telecom market to continue this fiscal (FY18), leaving bruised bottom lines in its wake.

“The profitability picture appears grim with aggregate Ebitda margins of the telecom industry (excluding Jio) expected to drop further by 50-to-100 basis points (bps) in fiscal 2017-18, which will be over and above the 600 bps drop to 29% estimated for FY17,” said Srinivasan.

According to Crisil, while the overall data traffic has grown five times in the past one year, a 60% fall in 4G data prices since Jio’s launch last September resulted in muted 2% growth in adjusted gross revenue (AGR) for the telecom industry in FY17.

Going forward, the rating agency expects top incumbents to report AGR growth “varying between 0-5% in the current fiscal, given the aggression being shown by them to protect their subscribers”.

Last month, Airtel had countered Jio’s Rs 303 per month Prime offer with a Rs 345 per month plan for prepaid users that dished out an identical 28 GB of 4G data over a month (with a 1 GB daily usage cap) and unlimited voice calls to all networks. Idea unveiled a Rs 348 plan offering 14 GB of data over 28 days with unlimited voice calls.

But Crisil’s Srinivasan said that the financials and business dynamics of leading global telcos in key high-data consuming markets also confirm “the premium attached to market leadership”.

For instance, Verizon, the largest US wireless carrier, he said, “enjoys higher profitability and returns than its peers as it boasts a sustained high market share, and its strong cash flows have enabled it invest in network quality, which, in turn, has ensured the lowest postpaid churn (under 1%) for the company”.

Other leading global carriers such as “Indonesia’s Telkomsel, South Korea’s SK Telekom and Australia’s Telstra, he said, are similar cases in point”.

According to Crisil Research, returns of Indian telcos also indicate a similar trend. For instance, “the profitability of Bharti’s India operations is better than its peers, and its average returns is closer to 10% compared with 6-to-8% for the next two players,” said Srinivasan.