India’s total telecom base (wired+wireless) jumped by 5.86 mn to cross 121 cr with teledensity of 93.98 in the month of Jun’17. Reliance Jio continues to attract more number of customers than its competitors with lucrative offers and aggressive marketing. It gained 6 mn customers in Jun’17 taking its total base to 123.36 mn and claiming market share of 10.39% in a very short span of time. Reliance Jio’s imminent launch of entry level 4G phone priced at Rs 1500 is expected to create further damage to established players like Airtel, Vodafone and Idea Cellular as they continue to bleed financially with falling revenues and profitability. Bharti Airtel, the leader in Indian telecom, added 2 mn new mobile customers with total base touching 280.6 mn and leading with market share of 23.65%.
State run telecom PSU BSNL has been doing commendable job of attracting more number of customers than strong competitors like Vodafone and Idea Cellular consistently. It reported net additions of close to 1 mn customers while Vodafone garnered 9.8 lakh and Idea Cellular 35541 customers. Vodafone’s mobile base is 211.9 mn with market share of 17.86% while Idea Cellular is witnessing decline in its market share consistently as it slumped from 16.69% in Jan’17 to 16.54% in Jun’17. Apart from these operators all other operators are losing customers month on month as most of them are in the process of merging or exiting telecom space. Rcom and Tata Docomo reported net loss of 1 mn and 1.72 mn respectively. Tata Docomo has been in news for exploring options to exit for quite some time but without any success till now.
