RANK 1: Losing Ground- AIRTEL

Despite registering growth in the revenue market share by 4% points, Airtel had to do away with 13% of its revenues in comparison to the last financial year.

Being the torch bearer of incumbent operators, it has been the worst hit of the hyper-competition that the market has been witnessing since the entry of Jio on the scene.

The company while could attribute its losses to the ‘unfathomable’ levels of competition in the market, has to take a bit of responsibility also on its shoulders by not organically transforming towards becoming an OTT oriented telecom operator.

Airtel worked on three strategies during the fiscal to better its position and save from further erosion of business, both in terms of revenues as well as the subscriber base.

1. a) The operator went out for a buyout and looked for all possible businesses it could acquire. This led to Tata Teleservices business coming into its kitty and Telenor finally becoming a part of its services.
2. b) The second thing Airtel worked upon was building and start offering the digital services that gave it the much required OTT flavour. Airtel TV and Wynk came to the existence or saw substantial improvement in terms of UX/UI as well as the content libraries. Another was forging partnerships with Amazon Prime as well as Netflix to bring the content to its subscribers.
3. c) The third was with a bit of pinch of salt. Airtel had to bring down prices of its packages and subscriptions to match with the competition, essentially Jio, and also offer unlimited voice, SMS and larger data packs to its users. This did result in arresting the churn for the operator in an extremely price sensitive market like India.

On the technology front, Airtel did introduce VoLTE in India, barring Himachal Pradesh and Jammu & Kashmir circles. However, it is only available to select user groups in Delhi, Bihar, and North East. Although all major brands of Smartphones and fast moving models have been enabled with VoLTE services of Airtel, still a lot of existing subscribers of Airtel are not on VoLTE because they might be using other Smartphones that are not yet enabled for the VoLTE services of the operator.

The operator also went aggressive with the fixed line broadband and using V-Fibre technology it is now offering 40 Mbps speeds and has also reduced the price plans with more GBs added to them. This was in anticipation of Jio launching its Jio Fibre (Jio GigaFibre) services, registration for which starts August 15th, 2018.

On the TV services, Airtel introduced Internet TV with a Smart STB connecting with the Broadband over WiFi as well as Ethernet. As it continues to see a dip in its DTH business, like other operators, monetising content and TV services is being achieved by pushing them over different platforms using IP technologies.

Airtel has also launched its Payment Bank as well as introduced Chatbot for customer service support.

One of the biggest challenges for Airtel in this fiscal and a few more to come would be to reorient itself as equally strong in the enterprise segment as it has been in the consumer market. As the country moves towards B2B2C era, the enterprise orientation of an operator becomes critical for success. Airtel shall have to gear up on that front as well to be ready for the next big opportunity for the Indian telecom.