Mobilutin
27
Skewed ARPU, diverse needs
Smartphones' growing numbers
ARPU is a declining trend across the globe. on the back of higher data usage
The ARPU of our addressable market will
drop by $0.9 over the next 4 years. Hence the
need for a smarter segmentation approach
for gaining incremental revenue share is
need of the hour. The case of segmenting
basis revenue (the typical low, medium, high
and very high) ARPU and usage (giving
disproportionate benefit for either increasing
usage on the preferred leg of usage on
starting usage on the lesser preferred legs of
usage) has been there and will be there for
operators. But the newer challenge that
operators are facing is that there ARPU is
skewed across geography. There are easily
demark-able “High ARPU” and “Low ARPU”
geographies.
Hence the future of segmenting would be
able to real-time segment customers' basis
geographies. Using this segmentation the
operators should be able to give extra
benefit to these low ARPU geography
retailers and consumers. The problem with
prepaid customers is that the location
captures of both consumers and retailers at
the time of enrollment is very loose, hence
un-reliable. Thus the need of doing this
segmentation and passing this benefit
should be done real-time i.e. at the moment of
truth, when the actual recharge happensThe
Prepaid retailer of today is shared across
businesses like E-money, FMCG, DTH
recharge, hand-set sales and many others.
This means they have less time for telecom
recharge customers. What makes dwindling
share of time dwindle further is that the
average retailer commission is 2~3%, Hence
his earning on an average recharge (which is
~.4 US dollars) is a meager 0.012 USD. Hence
the retailer is today resistant and evercomplaining of the time it takes for an erecharge through STK, USSD or SMS. The
only reason today's retailer sticks to selling
prepaid recharges is its high volumes and fast
pace of rotation (like FMCG).
A ray of hope is that the Prepaid Market will
have around 2.24 Bn new smartphone users
by 2020 (i.e. 40% of subscriber base). This is
a great surrogate indicating that the prepaid
retailers will also move towards more
smartphones. Hence a far faster and efficient
way for them to service the increasing prepaid
subscribers is through an APP. Wherein
instead of inputting a lot of numbers/texts,
he can click his way to a recharge. This
would mean that operators would be
investing for their retailers to use a more
efficient and less time taking recharge
platform like mobile APP.