The Numbers Game
The latest data provided by TRAI (Telecom Authority of India) showed the current position of the telecom companies. The Mukesh Ambani led telecom operator Reliance Jio yet again leads the telecom market with 58.3 % market shares. Their subscriber base also has widened by 9.1 million in October 2019. Reliance Jio, Bharti Airtel and Vodafone-Idea added 9.1 million, 5.0 million and 3.6 million subscribers translating into market shares of 58.3%, 20.9%, and 18.5% respectively in the mobile broadband category. In overall mobile users, Bharti Airtel and Vodafone-Idea saw an addition of 0.1 million and 0.2 million people respectively. Brokerage firm Edelweiss said Jio’s numbers fell below expectations as this was the first-month showing full impact of Jiophone sales at a discounted price of Rs.699.
“We expect RJIO’s subscriber addition momentum to sustain driven by lucrative Jiophone offerings as well due to its tariffs being 20% cheaper than competitors post price hikes. We also expect industry subscriber addition to slow down December onwards given the price hikes announced by telcos.” Edelweiss said.
Analysis of the PSUs
Out of the total, 89.80% market share of the wireless subscribers was held by the private access service providers; whereas PSUs like BSNL and MTNL had a market share of only 10.20%. In the wireline category, state-owned PSU’s BSNL and MTNL held 61.41% of market share as on 31’ st October 2019.
According to the overall reports, the industry saw the addition of 20.3 million active subscribers during the month with 14.4 million and 6.8 million addition for Jio and Airtel respectively and a loss of 0.7 million for Idea.
