Airtel, Vodafone Idea focus on high revenue customers

While Reliance Jio is becoming a mass market player with its prepaid tariffs almost a third of those offered by incumbents, Vodafone Idea (VIL) and Bharti Airtel have their focus on higher-Arpu (average revenue per user) customers, and it shows in the premium charged in postpaid tariffs compared to that of Jio’s. With this, the segmentation of telecom subscribers in India is becoming clearer now as telcos seem to have fixed their allegiance to their respective customer bases. In November, both Bharti and VIL adopted a minimum recharge scheme through which they fixed a ceiling of Rs 35 as the minimum recharge plan and discontinued all recharges below that. The move was aimed at forcing the incoming-only customers to start paying to stay on the respective networks.