Reliance Jio added the most number of active mobile phone users in March 2021. This finally put an end to the trend of losing to the Bharti Airtel for the last 3 months. Analysts said that Jio’s gains are a result of their strong consumer uptake from offers around the 4G feature phone—JioPhone. They also stated that Jio’s aggressive channel management helped them gain customers via the portability route.
While Jio added another 7.3 million active users in March, to its active user base which is now 332 million, Airtel managed to add 4.8 million active mobile users extending their lead in the market to 344 million. Jio’s current active user share is 33.4%. Airtel leads the active user share at 34.6%.
On the other hand, Vi continues losing active users. In March, Vodafone-Idea lost 0.4 million active users. This lowered its active user share further to 25.75%. The telco’s active user base for March dropped to 256 million.
Telecom Regulatory Authority of India’s (TRAI) active or ‘Visitor Location Register’ (VLR) data is a key metric of the data mentioned above. This tells us the actual number of customers who use a mobile network actively. The latest VLR ratio shows up to 97.72% for Airtel, 90.13% for Vi, and 78.43% for Jio.
IIFL Securities stated that said even though Vi suffered a marginal dip, “it had fared relatively better in Delhi and Mumbai, suggesting that overall customer losses (may) have stabilized in the March quarter”. It also said that Jio and Airtel home broadband customer gains had not changed much. Each added 0.17 million and 0.1 million users, respectively, in March. This has taken their total FTTH user bases to 2.6 million and 3.09 million, respectively.
