Airtel, which had reported flattish 3.13% sequential growth of data users in the June quarter (Q1 FY17), is looking to increase customer awareness for using the Internet. For quarter ended June 2016, Airtel's data revenue was up 5.5%. Talking to analysts, the company's senior management talked about data growth and the roll out of 4G. 1. Slowdown in data growth due to device price: Airtel managing director Gopal Vittal admitted that the company has witnessed a slowdown in mobile Internet penetration. "If you look at the total mobile broadband customer base in Q1 that is about 36-odd million customers and clearly something that we are concerned about, I think there are couple of barriers here, one is the price of the device because even today when you look at the shipments of smart phones our estimates are that in Q1 we will probably have about 25 million smartphones shipped out into India but equally there will be 30 million feature phones shipped out into India," he explained. "So there are sort of two or three segments within the overall countries with a particular large set of customers for whom a price of Rs 3,000 is unaffordably high and so the device is the barrier," Vittal added. 2. Trying out data sachet packs: Vittal added that the company is introducing sachet data packs where customers would be charged Rs 6 or Rs 9 per hour for data. He said that this was done as customer education on Internet data is still low.…
Please subscribe to MediaNama. Don't share prints and PDFs.
You May Also Like
News
Google has released a Google Travel Trends Report which states that branded budget hotel search queries grew 179% year over year (YOY) in India, in...
Advert
135 job openings in over 60 companies are listed at our free Digital and Mobile Job Board: If you’re looking for a job, or...
News
By Aroon Deep and Aditya Chunduru You’re reading it here first: Twitter has complied with government requests to censor 52 tweets that mostly criticised...
News
Rajesh Kumar* doesn’t have many enemies in life. But, Uber, for which he drives a cab everyday, is starting to look like one, he...