Reliance Jio gains active users at Airtel and Vi's expense

17 Nov 2023 , 01:48 AM

According to the most recent customer data released by the telecom regulator, Reliance Jio was the only telco to add active mobile consumers in August 2023, while its closest competitors, Bharti Airtel and Vodafone Idea (Vi), saw losses in this regard.

Analysts noted that this demonstrated how the market leader in telecoms had reduced the number of 2G customers of its more established competitors in response to the growing demand for Jio Bharat, a low-cost internet-enabled feature phone.

Jio’s August active customer count reached 417 million, according to figures from the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (Trai). This represents an addition of 1.2 million users. In comparison, Vi and Airtel lost 2.9 million and 0.4 million of these subscribers, respectively, bringing their respective active user counts down to 199 million and 376 million.

The monthly visitor location register (VLR) data released by Trai indicates the total number of active users of a mobile network.

As a result, Jio increased its lead over Airtel to 40% of the market for active users in August, while the 36% share held by the Sunil Mittal-led telecom company remained essentially steady. Vi, a telecom company, had a monthly decline in its active user share of 22 basis points (bps) to 19.1%. Here, 0.01% is one basis point.

According to the most recent Trai data, the telecom sector’s total active user base decreased by 3.1 million in August to 1,043 million, despite eight consecutive months of growth, as a result of Vi and Airtel’s combined losses in active users.

In August, Jio added 0.19 million users to its JioFibre service, bringing the total number of people using fixed broadband to 9.6 million. With the addition of 0.16 million people, Airtel now has 6.9 million wired broadband subscribers. With 3.7 million wired broadband customers, state-run Bharat Sanchar Nigam’s customer base remained mostly unchanged, highlighting its incapacity to successfully compete with Jio and Airtel.

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