Sunil Taldar headed Airtel Digital TV has been seeing a strong improvement in its market share and revenue growth over the last 15 months. Airtel Digital TV revenues witnessed a growth of 9.3% YoY on an underlying basis on the back of strong customer conditions. Bharti Airtel on Wednesday in its press release attributed the growth to the roll-out of the New Tariff Order.
Airtel Digital TV has seen consistent growth in its customer base since April 2019 with 1.2 million new customers during FY 20. In Q4 FY 20, Airtel Digital TV saw a strong net addition of 304K which took its subscriber base to 16.6 million, up from 15.4 million in FY 19. This was followed by a net addition of 226K in Q1 FY 21 despite COVID-19 induced lockdown across the country.
Airtel’s market share in the Digital TV market was 22% at the end of December 2019 which rose to 23.31% at the end of December 2019. The market share data for Q4 FY 20 is currently unavailable however since the start of 2020 Airtel has added another 530K or 0.53 million customers to its stable.
During FY 20 with an aim to widen its DTH market Airtel empowered its rural sales fraternity with freelancer technicians and other workers encouraged to sell and install new DTH connections at customer premises with over 4,099 active DOST executives across the country, engaged and empowered to drive new DTH activations under the DTH Dost program.
Bharti Airtel in its press release said, “Digital TV revenue witnessed a growth of 9.3% YoY on an underlying basis, on the back of strong customer additions growth of 5.1% to 16.8 Mn from 16.0 Mn in the corresponding quarter last year. The rollout of the new tariff order also helped Airtel in improving its market share and revenue growth. Effective March 1, 2020 onwards, the company has implemented new guidelines of NCF (Network Carriage Fees) under the new tariff order.”
