The Indian telecom industry has been witnessing cut-throat competition since the arrival of Reliance Jio in 2016. The telecom sector has been witnessing many dynamic changes since then like the merger of Vodafone and Idea cellular or recent restructuring plan by state owned BSNL which has been demanding for 4G spectrum so it can stay in the competition.
But all these changes and efforts by other telecom operators seems futile at least when, one looks at the number of subscribers each regulator added in January. As per the recent numbers revealed by telecom regulator-TRAI, Mukesh Ambani led Reliance Jio which is leading the list with 9.3 million new subscribers this year. Jio is followed by state owned BSNL which managed to add 9,86,681 new subscriber which as compared to Jio’s number is much less.
The third spot was bagged by Bharti Airtel which could only get 1,03,389 new subscriber in January this year. On the other hand, the newly merged telecom Vodafone-Idea Ltd witnessed loss of 3.5 million subscribers while in the same period Tata Teleservices suffered loss of 8,47,925 subscribers.
However, looking the market share of various telecom the situation seems bit different. In that segment the Vodafone-Idea merger leads with an overall 35.12% market share, followed by Bharti Airtel which owns a control over 28.8% share while Jio still is over 4% short of Airtel’s share with just 24.4% market share. Other telecoms like BSNL and Tata Teleservices are far behind these numbers with 9.76% and 1.54% market share respectively.
The situation for telecom operators other than Jio seems very dismal. All of them still seems to be recuperating from the disruption that Jio has caused due to its aggressive and cheap tariff plans, thus to counter that most other telecoms are now offering services at much lower rates and are giving bundled packages, example subscription of other services like Amazon prime.