In the duration of less than two years, Vodafone Idea has lost 116.13 million subscribers, pushing down the company to the third position with a user count of 325 million. On the contrary, during the same period, Reliance Jio nourished its user count and Bharti Airtel successfully retained its market share. In a broad view, Vodafone Idea has drastically lost more subscribers in more than a year as compared to the overall wireless user base of state-run BSNL.
Vodafone India and Idea Cellular had collaborated on August 31, 2018 and the combined subscriber base of the combined entity stood at 441.65 million. During that time, the subscriber count of Bharti Airtel shot up to 345.88 million while Reliance Jio reached 239.23 million. And as on August 2018, Vodafone Idea was market leader with 37.85% share, accompanied by Airtel with 29.64% and Reliance Jio at 20.50%. BSNL’s wireless share was 9.73%.
In the meantime, Vodafone Idea has been struggling in adding wireless broadband users too. The company has only 118.23 million broadband users, which is the lowest in the industry. And on the other hand, Jio has 382.83 million broadband users as the telco is a pure play 4G operator while Airtel has 143.65 million wireless broadband users as on February 2020.