Ongoing tariff war will come to an end soon - says industry experts.

In yesterday's website updating, we have explained how the tariff war started by Reliance Jio has seriously affected BSNL's financial condition. Further, citing the views of industry experts, we have also stated that the ongoing tariff war will come to an end by around March, 2019. Thereafter, call and data tariffs will start rising, as a result of which revenue collections of telecom companies, including BSNL will also start improving. As a result of this, BSNL will start coming out of the present crisis. Our views are based on the assessment of telecom industry experts. In this connection, we reproduce hereunder, statements of some industry experts, published in the ET Telecom, dated 14-10-2018.

The turmoil in the telecom sector seems to be easing with prices remaining largely stable for the past three quarters and some industry executives and experts seeing tariffs edging up in the next two quarters. That could end more than two years of rock bottom prices for Indian telecom consumers.

“The days of freebies for mobile consumers may be finally coming to an end as the high cost of money is definitely hurting telcos and putting pressure, particularly on the incumbents, which should lead to some tariff hikes in the next two quarters,” Sanjiv Bhasin, executive vice-president, markets and corporate affairs, IIFL, told ET.

The lack of tariff cuts for several months suggests “Jio could remove discounts and promotions going forward, which will likely be adopted by incumbents,” said Nitin Soni, director, corporates, at global rating agency Fitch.