Wireless Intelligence ranked top 25 mobile operators by revenue. On the top was China Mobile, the largest mobile operator in terms of subscribers and revenue. The second place was Vodafone group, based mainly in Western Europe. American operators: Verizon (#4), AT&T (#6), and Sprint (#10), all were in the top ten. However, Japanese operators: NTT DoCoMo (#7), KDDI (#9), and SoftBank Mobile (#13) were among the highest ARPU in the list, ranging from US $60 to US $80. Indian-based operators were absent from the list.
Despite huge amount of population and subscribers, Indian market's ARPU was too low to compensate its revenue generation. Low penetration markets like India (around 50% in 1Q 2010) turned out to have a very high level of competition so that the mobile service's price was very cheap. In contrast, mature markets such as Japan, US, and Western Europe demonstrated a very high price for mobile service, even if the penetration hit the ceiling for quite a while.
Mature markets seem to always have higher ARPU than developing markets. As ARPU around the world continues to decline, could India break the rule and raise its ARPU once the market becomes mature?
source - Wireless Intelligence
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