As you probably already guessed, it’s about unit prices for calls, messages or internet, without packages. You’ll say that I’m not interested in this, because I have unlimited packages, but I encourage you to read it, because it should be an interesting topic for you too.
The basic price list in the Orange, Play, Plus and T-Mobile prepaid offers looks as follows – I will only mention that Orange has attempted to include such a comparison table on its website:
So far, only Play has decided to apply such drastic fees: per minute of conversation – PLN 0.79, per SMS message – PLN 0.79, per MMS message – PLN 0.79 and per 1 MB – PLN 1.23. Not without reason, we will come back to this in a moment.
In T-Mobile prepaid, the prices in this table are still valid, but as of August 27, a new price list comes into effect, almost identical to that in Play (link to pdf).
There is one difference here compared to Play – all services will cost PLN 0.79, including internet for 1 MB of usage. Is it a lot or a little? How to measure it? Let’s just look at the offer of one of Play’s sub-brands – Fakt Mobile:
15 groszy for everything – don’t look at the internet, because here it is free without packages, but with a limit of 32 kb/s.
So where do these prices come from for our “big four” operators? There can only be one answer – ARPU (average revenue per user), or average revenue per customer.
This is one of the most important indicators for operators, based on which the effectiveness of the current offer is measured, new packages are constantly being created and marketing activities are being built, encouraging changes to offers to new, more expensive ones, so that ARPU increases with each subsequent financial report for investors.
However, this is not an easy task, despite a number of increases along the way, in two years it was possible to increase ARPU for mobile services by just PLN 2 to PLN 24.2 per month (ARPU is calculated on a monthly basis) – these are the operators’ data reported to UKE.
One of the operators managed to reach almost PLN 30 per month by the end of 2023, and it is Play, which has been applying prohibitive prices in its prepaid offer for some time now.
Yes, because prepaid offers are what are dragging down ARPU for operators. There is a large group of customers who do not want to buy cyclical monthly packages. For various reasons, for example, they do not use mobile services intensively, and for those few minutes called per month they are willing to pay according to the basic price list.
This is why operators charge such high and increasingly high fees in their main brands. And it’s not just this that they want to “encourage” people to buy packages. I’ll mention all those promotions with “free” gigabytes, provided they are bought and maintained cyclical, which have been with us for over two years now (interestingly, T-Mobile started them). All in order to increase ARPU in prepaid offers.
How much is it? Play provides only general ARPU in its reports – for all mobile services, without a breakdown into post-paid and pre-paid, but I found such in T-Mobile’s detailed financial report for 2023.
This is also an interesting issue, because you can check the total revenue for the entire year that this operator had from your subscription offers – PLN 2.8 billion and from prepaid offers almost PLN 1 billion.
I didn’t find any ARPU data in this report either, but it’s easy to estimate based on the number of customers. At the end of 2023, T-Mobile had 12.6 million customers in total – including 8.2 million in subscriptions and 4.4 million in prepaid offers.
So the overall ARPU for all mobile services in 2023 was PLN 25.37 per month, which is slightly above the average from the UKE report. In turn, the subscription fee alone will be PLN 29.10 per month, which is close to the overall ARPU at Play, but T-Mobile is being dragged down by the prepaid offer – just PLN 18.41 per month.
Thanks to these calculations, we can also see the scale that operators are fighting for, comparing the general ARPU of Play – PLN 30 and T-Mobile – PLN 25, gives a PLN 5 monthly difference per customer, which multiplied by several million makes a huge difference. So there is no reason to be surprised by such high unit costs in price lists and I think that this is not the last word in this area.
Stock Image from Depositphotos.
Source: antyweb.pl
