NT suffers drop in subscribers spending

KATHMANDU, April 1: As the telecommunicaiton industries continue to expand services, customers have started being careful about their expenditure. This is what the financial statment of largest telecom operator of the country suggests.



Despite the increment in total earning of Nepal Telecom (NT), average revenue per user (ARPU) of all the voice services has gone down in last fiscal year.[break]



According to the financial statement of NT, ARPU of a service was down by as much as Rs 63 per month. NT customers on an average spent Rs 535 per month compared to Rs 565 a year ago in fixed line.



The statistics suggest that although the customer base of fixed line penetration is the least, it is still the popular service in terms of usage as the ARPU of the fixed line is the highest compared to GSM and CDMA service of the operator.



Surendra Thike, spokesperson of NT opined that fixed line was being used more in corporate level than in household making it a service yielding highest ARPU. “The better quality and cheaper tariff also encourages people in household level to increase it more,” added he.



Likewise a GSM user spends just Rs 221 per month which was as high as Rs 285 in 2009/10. Being the service with highest customer base NT was able to collect Rs 13.3 billion in revenue from 5.01 million customers last fiscal year.



The total earning for this service was Rs 12.99 billion but the number of users was limited to 3.8 million. Although there was significant growth of around 70 percent in users, same was not reflected in terms of earning.



The ARPU in CDMA service has also declined by Rs 33 per month. A CDMA user spent Rs 258 per month in last fiscal year. NT´s CDMA base in last fiscal year reached to 864,000 and collected the revenue of Rs 2.68 billion.



Thike said reducing ARPU with increasing number of service was global trend in recent time. “We had unveiled various offers particularly in CDMA, STD/ISD calls and also Post-Paid service which might be other factor for declining ARPU,” he said.



He further said that revenue from voice was decreasing and increasing competition was the other factor. “Data service and other value added service (VAS) is our focus now and we hope revenue from these services will pick up in days to come as attraction in voice services is going down,” added he.



NT had observed the marginal growth of around 3 percent in last fiscal year. Its total net profit was Rs 10.77 billion by the end of fiscal year 2010/11 whereas its profit a fiscal year ago was Rs 10.17 billion.

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