Jon Fredrik Baksaas, president and CEO, Telenor said it will focus and invest on mobile Internet opportunities in India.
Telenor added 4 million new subscribers this quarter and have added 10 million new subscribers so far this year and this is driven by India, Bangladesh, and Pakistan.
“Data usage is also increasing in India and it’s increasingly rapidly also in our customer segments. From May to June, data usage increased by 15 percent. And data consumption is already contributing to ARPU growth in India. We see this is a strong potential for future revenue growth in our customer segments in this respect,” Baksaas said.
Telenor, which announced a new CEO in India, said it is improving market position quarter-by-quarter. It’s taking significantly more than its fair share of the total subscriber growth in the circles where it is present. “We are opening new segments to the benefits of modern communication services by attracted and affordable services on offer,” Baksaas said.
Uninor, the Indian telecom arm of Telenor, will be continuing to improve the population coverage within six circles by redeploying equipment from the circles that it exited in 2012.
Since the company is re-utilizing its existing telecom infrastructure, Telenor is not expecting significant increase in Capex (capital spending) in India.
The redeployment program which now is one-third on its way comprises around 5,000 telecom sites and is expected to be completed by the end of the third quarter this year and this will improve coverage from 42 percent to around 51 percent.
Uninor, which competes with established players such as Bharti Airtel, Idea Cellular, Vodafone, etc. said its mobile subscriber market share currently stands at 10 percent in the circles whereas the revenue market share stands at 6 percent in second quarter of 2014.
“We are working to strengthen our challenging position in India. We see solid growth trends continuing this quarter with 2 million new subscribers taking the customer base to 32.6 million, 46 percent organic revenue growth this quarter, slightly up from last quarter and 11 percent ARPU growth,” Baksaas said.
