MUMBAI: Cash-strapped Vodafone Idea’s subscriber losses slowed to a six-month low in March, while market leader Reliance Jio continued to add the most number of users, outpacing nearest rival Bharti Airtel, telecom regulator data showed Friday.
Jio added 2.14 million users, followed by Airtel, which added 1.75 million users, according to data released by the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (Trai) on Friday. While Vi continued to suffer losses, giving away 684,530 users in March, they were narrowed down to the lowest number in the past six months, said analysts.
The combination of Airtel and Jio customer gains resulted in India’s mobile user base rising by 0.80% to 924.07 million in end-March. Airtel though added more wireless broadband users at 3.6 million than Jio, which added 2.56 million. Vi continued losses, giving away 1.13 million 3G and 4G users in March, the data showed.
Jio has now emerged as the world’s largest mobile operator in data traffic consumption, surpassing China Mobile.
The total traffic on the Jio network has reached 40.9 Exabytes compared with China Mobile’s 38 Exabytes during the January-March quarter, according to global analytics firm Tefficient.
Jio also holds the second largest 5G subscriber base globally at 108 million, with more than 28% of its total wireless data traffic now being consumed by 5G users, the company said in its analyst presentation last month.
Airtel recorded the highest percentage of active subscribers on its network at 99.91%. Active, or visitor location register (VLR), data indicates the number of mobile users regularly using a mobile network.
Airtel’s active user base jumped to 385.41 million in March from 382.60 million in February, while Jio’s rose from 426.79 million to 430.36 million in the same period. Vi’s active user base shrank marginally from 193.85 million to 193.27 million, as per Trai data.
In the wireless category, Jio widened its customer market share to 40.30% holding 469.8 million subscribers, while Airtel’s rose to 33.10% with a total of 385.8 million. Vi’s share narrowed to 18.86% at 219.8 million users. In both the wireline and wireless category, Jio continued to hold half of all telecom subscriptions.
Jio also consolidated its market leadership in the landline segment recording double the number of additions than Airtel. Jio added 3.99 million wireline users, taking its wireline subscriber base to 12 million, while second-ranked Airtel added a modest 2.06 million, totalling 8.8 million wireline subscribers, as per current Trai data.
Source: The Economic Times