Vodafone Idea, which continued to lose subscribers in the September quarter despite investments in 4G capacity and coverage expansion, expects to see a turnaround in the trend by the end of the fiscal, the management said at the earnings call on Thursday.
The telco lost 5 million subscribers sequentially in Q2FY25, including 800,000 4G/5G subscribers.
The struggling telco deployed a capex of Rs 1,360 crore to beef up its 4G capacity by 14% and population coverage by 22 million in the September quarter. It has earmarked Rs 8,000 crore as capex for the rest of the fiscal.
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“As we make these investments, which will be based on new supplies and the impact of that (investment) is more pronounced, and with us coming out of some of the subscriber losses in the quarter gone by, which is also the impact of the tariff increase, my gut feel is that by the end of the financial year we should have turned around the trajectory. This is the expectation though it is difficult to give an exact timeline,” Akshaya Moondra, chief executive officer, Vodafone Idea, said.
He added that the company has already started seeing improvements on key metrics in areas where the investments have been made. However, “at this point they do not convert to an increase in revenues or reducing the loss of subscribers”.
Moondra also said that while with every subsequent price hike, the trend of sim consolidation reduces, this time Vodafone Idea was affected by the migration of customers to BSNL. All three private telcos undertook tariff hikes in July this year. Vodafone Idea hiked its consumer-facing tariffs by an average of 16% across prepaid and postpaid services.
“BSNL has been a beneficiary this time, which has not been the case in the past. However, we have seen the impact reversing quickly from August to September, September to October, and October to November. In some way, we are inching towards the position that we were in before the tariff increase,” he added.
He also pointed out that not all the price hike has reflected in revenue increase since the government, enterprise and machine-to-machine segments did not see any price increase. The full impact of the consumer-facing price hikes is expected over the next two quarters.
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