ARPU of cellular mobile segment rises to Rs440 in 2015

ISLAMABAD: The Average Revenue Per User (ARPU) per month of cellular mobile segment in the country has increased to Rs440 during 2015 as compared to Rs432 last year, a Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA) report said on Thursday.

The PTA’s Biometrics Verification System (BVS) campaign helped clean subscribers’ data which resulted in true representation of ARPU in Pakistan. The ARPU is the average revenue generated by cellular companies from a user on their network service in a given month, revealed the PTA report.

The report said as per GSMA’s market analysis, users of cellular mobile service in Pakistan have on average 2.17 SIMs and average revenue per SIM in Pakistan stands at Rs203 for year 2015.

The SIM re-verification drive boosted the ARPU of cellular mobile industry which is a good sign for the telecom outlook, the report said. Potential investors and existing companies consider high ARPU a major attraction for investment in a telecom market, it added.

ARPU is expected to rise in the coming months as more subscribers are being added into 3G and 4G (LTE) services, generating more data revenue for operators.

The rising share of data revenue in overall operator revenue figures also points towards the fact that data would be the new cash cow for the cellular industry.

Moreover, the report said the cellular mobile network covers more than 92 percent of the land area of Pakistan. The number of cell sites has been increasing at a steady pace over the last few years, as operators realised that the quality of service and tapping uncovered areas are pre requisites to win customer loyalty.

The cellular companies are moving more and more towards tower-sharing and are exploring options of sale and rent lease of towers.

Therefore, the focus is more towards increasing efficiency rather than the number of towers.

The report said that total cell sites of Cellular Mobile Operators (CMP) reached 40,704 at the end of 2015, as compared to 37,576 last year, showing an increase of 8.3 percent.

As cellular operators focused on extending their reach after the successful launch of 3G and 4G LTE services, an increase is evident last year.

At the end of 2015, Mobilink has considerable advantage over the rest of the operators as it now has 9,902 cell sites across Pakistan, while its nearest competitor China Mobile Pakistan (Zong) has 8,651 towers. Telenor is almost at par with Ufone with 8,321 and 8,318 towers respectively, while Warid has the least number of subscribers and also the lowest number of towers at 5,512.