Asian mobile operators bet on gen AI to raise their ARPU

Last week, Japanese mobile carrier KDDI announced it would start to provide Starlink’s direct-to-cellphone service. Quite remarkably, the “au Starlink Direct” offer notably enables users to get support from Google’s Gemini. Although not the first of its kind, this agreement is still pretty rare in the region and beyond, as it embodies how telecom operators can monetize AI on the customer side, moreover on the B2C side. So far, AI has been implemented mainly in two areas in the telecom industry: operations management and customer assistance. In both cases, AI-based solutions are highly valuable because they enable telecom operators to cut costs. However, they do not grow operators' revenue.  In contrast, the most advanced telecom operators have started monetizing gen AI solutions, mostly on their customer business segment. LG Uplus in South Korea and Rakuten Mobile in Japan have for instance unveiled their own LLM (large language model) earlier this year, effectively addressing corporate needs for such products. But very few similar offers were launched on the B2C side until recently. After SK Telecom (South Korea) opened the way last year by offering Perplexity Pro to its mobile customers, SoftBank (Japan), Singtel (Singapore) and Taiwan Mobile (Taiwan) all followed suit in Q1 2025. As shown in the chart below, mobile retail ARPUs have been mostly declining over the past few years for the 5 mobile carriers aforementioned. Only KDDI has performed well, notably thanks to efficient market segmentation and corresponding subbrand management, and high customer satisfaction. KDDI is thus the 5th operator in the region to bet on gen AI offers to increase its mobile ARPU. After OTT services, music streaming or mobile payment solutions, will gen AI services be the next major value-added service aggregated by mobile operators? This research highlight is based on our data coverage of Telecom in Asia. Please contact us to get a demo and see the depth of our service.