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Airtel to withdraw discounts, no tariff hike for now

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Sharath Kumar
New Update

NEW DELHI, INDIA:Telecom major Bharti Airtel Ltd, is planning to withdraw discounts, improve efficiency and save costs instead of going for a tariff revision.

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Gopal Vittal, CEO for Airtel India and South Asia said on Wednesday at a briefing on the telco's fiscal fourth quarter earnings that:"The current levels of voice tariffs are not sustainable. Input costs like fuel are rising. We are in a deeply competitive market and we will continue to reduce discounts wherever we see an opportunity."

"At the end of the day, increasing the headline tariff makes no sense with most users paying significant discounts to the headline tariff," Khare said. "The headline tariff is like a card rate and only once the discounts are completely taken out does it makes sense."

Vittal said the company is seeing improvement in the quality of subscribers that has led to the lowest ever churn levels of 2.4pc for the March quarter.

Churn refers to the percentage of subscribers leaving the network.

Bharti expects merger and acquisition transactions to rise after the government announced new rules for the telecom sector.

"With the new merger and acquisition (M&A) norms allowing 50pc revenue market share, we will see a lot more active consolidation in the next 2-3 years," said Sarvjit Singh Dhillon, chief financial officer of Bharti Enterprises.

Bharti Airtel is unlikely to acquire any telco as part of the consolidation as it does not see any advantage to accrue to it from such a transaction, Dhillon said.

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