Reliance Jio, Bharti Airtel and Vodafone Idea (Vi) have all lost active users in July 2022 as increased cost of mobile services after tariff hikes taken by operators last winter led to some de-activations, said experts, analyzing the latest customer data put out by the sector regulator.
Yoo and Airtel lost 1 million active users each, reducing their base of such customers to 382 million and 356 million respectively in July. Vi lost as many as 1.7 million such users, shrinking its active mobile user base to 217 million.
Jio, though, has retained its leadership in the active users market with a 37.7% share, while Airtel and Vi’s active user market shares were at 35.2% and 21.4% respectively in July, data collated by the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (Trai) showed.
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“Industry-wide active sub-base has dipped by 4.3 million, month-on-month (vs a dip of 0.2 million in Jun’22 and +2.8 million in the past six months),” ICICI Securities said in a note, analyzing data put out by Trai.
It added that while the active users base has shrunk across operators in July, Vi’s 1.7 million active subs decline, posed a key concern, underlining the cash-strapped telco’s continuing inability to compete with Jio and Airtel on the 4G services front, and its imminent challenges going forward once the top two carriers launch 5G services.
Active, or visitor location register (VLR), data put out every month by Trai, indicates the number of mobile users actively using a mobile network.
“The significant active user losses reflect the impact of high inflation and costlier mobile services, which is likely to have forced many low-value users, particularly in the rural markets, not to recharge and deactivate their SIMs,” said another analyst at a leading global brokerage
Motilal Oswal, though, said that the pace of industry-wide 4G user additions continued in July at a healthy 5.7 million, similar to June 2022 levels. “Jio reported 2.9 million 4G user additions, followed by Airtel (2.6 million), while Vi’s 4G user base saw no change.”
Bharti Airtel, however, added more wired broadband users than Jio in July, although the latter retained its market leadership on this score.
Airtel added 0.14 million wired broadband customers in July, taking its fixed broadband user base to 5 million. Jio, in turn added 0.11 subscribers to its JioFiber service in July, taking its home broadband user base to 6.3 million.
State-run Bharat Sanchar Nigam Ltd (BSNL) reported additions of 0.01 million, taking its wired broadband users base to 3.9 million in July.
“Jio’s market share (in the wired broadband subs space) dipped marginally to 21.3% (down 18bps MoM) while that for Bharti rose to 16.9% (up 4bps MoM),” ICICI Securities said, analyzing Trai data.
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Price competition continues let’s see who wins the race.
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