Reliance Jio is taking over the Indian telecom industry rapidly. According to the latest TRAI subscriber tally for the month of June, Reliance Jio added 45 lakh customers to their services. Both Airtel and Vodafone saw a huge number of customers walk away from their services. According to the data, Airtel and Vodafone India lost 11.3 lakh and 48.2 lakh users respectively in that month. Reliance is already the company that has the most market domination in the country and is still rapidly increasing its subscriber base on a regular basis, which might be alarming for its rivals.
Telecom Regulatory Authority of India’s (TRAI) monthly subscription data also highlights that the Indian overall wireless subscriber base is shrinking. The data shows that India’s subscriber base shrunk to 114 crores, an estimated shrinking of 0.28 percent at the end of June. The decline has been recorded in both urban and rural sectors. This might be the effect of the COVID-19 pandemic, where thousands lost their jobs.
Urban areas saw a decline rate of 0.18 percent monthly, whereas the decline rate was recorded to be 0.40 percent in the rural areas. The share of the urban and rural mobile subscribers was said to be 54.3 percent and 45.7 percent respectively, according to the data.
Jio, the brainchild of Mukesh Ambani, the richest man of Asia and fourth richest man of the world, which has also received several Investissements in the recent weeks was the only telecom service provider that added subscribers to its database. All other companies saw lakhs of subscribers departing from their services. Jio brought in 44.9 lakh new subscribers, hiking up its wireless customer base to 39.7 crores.
Bharti Airtel, whose subscriber base includes Tata Teleservices saw 11.3 lakh users walk away from its mobile services in the month of June. The subscriber base of Bharti Airtel was estimated to be 31.6 crores for the month of June.
Another major player in the telecom industry, Vodafone Idea, which recently rebranded itself as a new entity combining resources of Vodafone India and Idea group, also saw a decline of user base. Their subscriber base fell by 48.2 lakh during the month to 30.5 crores.
Although the wireless data services recorded losses in subscriber amounts, subscribers for broadband services hiked up in June. This is the effect of state and union induced lockdowns in the country to f restrict the spread of the coronavirus. According to data, the total number of broadband subscribers in India rose from 683.7 million (68.3 crores) at the end of May to 698.23 million (69.8 crores) at the end of June. This marks a growth of almost two percent for the month.
According to TRAI, the top five service providers constituted 98.93 percent market share of the total broadband subscribers at the end of June. “These service providers were Reliance Jio Infocomm Ltd (398.31 million), Bharti Airtel (151.30 million), Vodafone Idea (116.45 million), BSNL (23 million)…,” the regulatory body informed.
According to the Visitor Location Register (VLR), a key metric reflecting the number of active subscribers on a mobile network shows that 98.14% of the users were active for Airtel, 89.49% for Vodafone Idea (VI), and 78.15% for Jio.
Reliance Jio today has announced new postpaid plans for its users. The plan bundle offers like a free subscription to OTT platforms Amazon Prime, Disney+ Hotstar, and Netflix and a host of other benefits in their new postpaid plan named Jio PostpaidPlus.
The tariffs of the plan range between ₹ 399 and ₹ 1,499, the latest range of Jio postpaid plans will be available from September 24 in Jio Stores and via home delivery, which will come free with activation.
Bharti Airtel and Vodafone saw their stocks tumble after the announcement of the new plan by the market dominator Reliance