Over 250 million users may cut connections on Vodafone Idea, Airtel focus on profitable customers

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26 Aug, 2025 12:21

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Over 250 million users may lose their mobile connections as Vodafone Idea and Bharti Airtel have decided to focus on profitable customers and disconnect subscribers with a low average realisation per user (ARPU), reported Financial Express.

The ARPU is a measure of the average revenue generated per user. To boost this measure across customers, Vodafone Idea and Bharti Airtel rolled out minimum recharge plans earlier this month.

The plan lists a minimum recharge pack of Rs 35 a month, which means that users who do not recharge their plans would see outgoing calls blocked in 30 days and incoming ones in 45 days.

A rough estimate suggests that over 250 million subscribers spend less than Rs 35 a month on recharge plans. While Airtel has about 100 million such users, Vodafone Idea has around 150 million users who recharge below Rs 35 a month, the report said.

Earlier, a user could recharge for a top-up of Rs 10. If the plan was exhausted, a subscriber could not make outgoing calls but would continue to receive incoming calls for as long as the plan was valid, which could be a maximum of six months.

These 250 million subscribers are said to be dual SIM users, meaning that they have two mobile connections and they use the lower recharge for only incoming calls. Airtel and Vodafone Idea have calculated that with this move either the user would move up the ARPU chain or move to the operator whose SIM he is using as a primary one.

According to the report, companies get an ARPU of about Rs 10 from users who recharge for Rs 35 a month. If the minimum recharge each month remains the same, Bharti’s monthly revenue from them would be Rs 100 crore.

Read — Airtel, Vodafone Idea roll out minimum recharge plans to boost ARPU: Report

"We have about 330 million customers in wireless, but if you look at the pattern of consumption across the base you will find that there is a very large number of customers, some of whom we acquired from Telenor and some that we have ourselves, about 100 million customers with very low levels of ARPU. So, the ARPU is sort of low double-digit," Bharti Airtel CEO and Managing Director (India and South Asia) Gopal Vittal told the paper.

Vittal said that one could expect some shrinkage of their low-end customer base as they move to minimum ARPU plans, but there would be a dramatic growth of pre-paid on 4G and the post-paid segment. Vittal also said that company's focus would be to get users who use Volte feature phones to upgrade directly to smartphones.

Read — Vodafone Idea to hike minimum recharge tariffs to address negative free-cash issue

"It was a substantial number that was in use either only for incoming or had got ARPUs below that of the average or that of unlimited customers. The ARPU of non-unlimited is about a fourth of the ARPU of the customers who take the unlimited plan. Therefore, everybody who goes up the chain is an upside, even within the non-unlimited, because now he or she is paying a rupee in the Rs 35 a month package, so that is an upside versus those who were not paying us even a rupee, unless many of them choose instead to go to unlimited package which is also very good for us because there is an ARPU increase there," Vodafone Idea CEO Balesh Sharma said.

Read — Bharti Airtel down 4% even as analysts see ARPUs bottoming out
In the July-September quarter, Bharti Airtel reported an ARPU at Rs 101 while for Vodafone Idea it was at Rs 88.