Reliance Jio, Bharti Airtel gain subscribers in November 2022 at Vi's expense: TRAI data

Reliance Jio and Bharti Airtel gained 1.42 million and 1.05 million mobile users respectively in November, largely at the expense of cash-strapped Vodafone Idea (Vi), which continued to suffer big customer losses, unable to compete effectively with its stronger rivals.

Vi lost a whopping 1.82 million mobile users in November, further shrinking its user base to 243.79 million. By contrast, Jio and Airtel user bases expanded to 422.80 million and 366.08 million respectively, latest subscriber data collated by the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (Trai) showed.

Separately, Jio further consolidated its market leadership in the landline space in November. Trai data showed Jio added 0.21 million wireline users, boosting its landline user base to 8.10 million. Erstwhile market leader BSNL lost another 3,021 wireline users, marginally reducing its landline user base to 7.09 million. Third-ranked Airtel added 0.13 million users, boosting its wireline user base further to around 6.63 million.

Analysts said Jio and Airtel’s steady mobile user gains in November indicated both had grabbed the bulk of Vi’s churning data customers, underlining the latter’s continuing struggles on the 4G operations front. They added that Vi’s heavy customer losses in November continued to reflect its liquidity woes amid a long pending fundraise, which has hindered network investments and its ability to retain customers.

Trai data showed Jio and Airtel have widened their customer market shares to 36.99% (36.85%) and 32.03% (31.92%) respectively over the previous month while Vi’s has narrowed further to 21.33% (21.48%).

Visitor Location Register, a key metric reflecting the number of active users on a mobile network, indicated that Airtel had 98.06% of its users active on the network, 91.77% for Jio and 86.02% for Vi.

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Trai data, though, shows Vi and Airtel both lost customers in rural India, while Jio made modest gains. Vi and Airtel lost 1.37 million and 0.73 million users respectively in these geographies while Jio added around 0.56 million.Data collated by the sector regulator showed India’s mobile user base was almost flattish at 1.143 billion in end-November.

Trai data also showed that overall wireless tele-density fell marginally to 82.64% in November from 82.75% in October.

Trai data also showed some 12.02 million users submitted requests for mobile number portability, increasing the cumulative requests to 771.94 million by end-November.

The wireline users base increased from 26.82 million in end-October to 27.13 million at the end of November, a net rise of 0.27 million.

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