Indian telecom industry’s revenue grew by Rs 1 lakh cr in five years: DoT’s Manish Sinha - ET Telecom (2024)

• Policy
• 2 min read

NEW DELHI: The Indian telecom industry’s gross revenue has increased by Rs 1 lakh crore between 2018-19 to 2022-23 on the back of the government’s reforms for the sector, according to a senior Department of Telecommunications (DoT) official.

“We started at an ARPU (average revenue per user) of probably Rs 100 around 2018 or 2019. Now, we are Rs 150-plus, and in some cases, telecom operators are approaching Rs 200 and aspire to reach Rs 300. In terms of gross revenue, it's almost increased by Rs 1 lakh crore since 2018-19. If a similar growth takes place in ARPU, then there will be an increase in the income to the tune of Rs 50,000 crore to Rs 1 lakh crore in the coming years,” said Manish Sinha, Member (Finance), Department of Telecommunications (DoT).

He was speaking at the seventh edition of ETTelecom 5G|6G Congress 2024 on Thursday.

Sinha said that the industry achieved the benchmark of Rs 3 lakh crore in gross revenues last year which he attributed to the reforms made in October 2021.

“A lot of nitty gritties were resolved regarding the new taxation policies. In the case of spectrum usage charges, the weighted average compliance to the telecom operators has reduced from approximately 5% to 0.5%. A lot of money has been freed up for further investment and capex in 5G. Some reduction also took place in the license fee…and there were a host of other measures that enabled a lot more capex to be available to the telcos over the last two years,” the telecom department official said.

Telcos annually pay 8% of AGR as license fees while the overall SUC payout is well below 1% of AGR after the government had said airwaves acquired from the last 5G auction onwards won’t attract any SUC.

However, the retail and enterprise uptake of fifth-generation technology has not been as expected, Sinha said.

“I think one of the significant opportunities was CNPN (captive non-public networks). I see a very slow uptake from the telecom service operators in creating CNPN networks. Either they are not seeing revenue opportunity in creating those networks. Otherwise, there should be enough demand. I think telcos need to look more specifically as to how they can assist in setting up these captive networks and design commercial agreements,” he said.

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