According to experts who analysed the most recent customer data released by the industry regulator, Reliance Jio, Bharti Airtel, and Vodafone Idea (Vi) all lost active users in July 2022 as a result of rising mobile service costs following tariff increases implemented by operators last winter that resulted in some deactivations.
In July, the active user bases of Jio and Airtel fell by 1 million apiece, to 382 million and 356 million, respectively. Vi lost up to 1.7 million of these customers, bringing the total number of active mobile users to 217 million.
However, Jio has continued to top the market for active users with a 37.7% share, while Airtel and Vi had respective active user market shares of 35.2% and 21.4% in July, according to data compiled by the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (Trai).
“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, analysing data put out by Trai.
Vi’s decline of 1.7 million active subscribers, it continued, highlighted the cash-strapped telco’s continued inability to compete with Jio and Airtel on the 4G services front and its impending challenges moving forward once the top two carriers launch 5G services, even though the active user base had shrunk across operators in July.
“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.”
However, Jio added more new wired broadband customers in July than Bharti Airtel, despite the latter maintaining its market dominance in this regard.
In July, Airtel added 0.14 million wired broadband users, bringing the total number of users of its fixed broadband service to 5 million. In consequence, Jio had 0.11 more customers sign up for JioFibre in July, bringing the total number of people using home broadband to 6.3 million. The number of wired broadband subscribers at the government-run Bharat Sanchar Nigam Ltd (BSNL) increased by 0.01 million in July, bringing the total to 3.9 million.
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