Jio adds almost 4.5 million subscribers in June; Airtel, Vi suffer customer losses: Trai

KOLKATA: Reliance Jio outclassed its two older incumbent rivals, adding nearly 4.5 million mobile phone users in June 2020, taking its subscriber tally past 397 million, signalling that consumers had taken last December’s tariff hike in their stride, and further helped by the gradual easing of Covid19 lockdown restrictions.

Bharti Airtel and Vodafone Idea (Vi), however, lost 1.12 million and 4.82 million customers respectively in June, in the aftermath of the December 2019 hikes and post-lockdown pangs as many feature phone users with prepaid connections gave up mobile connections as they were unable to recharge.

Last December, Airtel, Vi and Jio had increased bundled prepaid tariffs for the first time in 3 years by around 14-33%.

Jio’s June user base swelled to 397.24 million, while Airtel’s and Vi’s fell to 316.67 million and 305.10 million, as per latest telco subscriber data collated by the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (Trai) and issued Thursday.

Airtel and Vi though have reported customer bases of 279.87 million and 279.80 million respectively in their June quarter earnings numbers, while Jio reported a user base of 398.3 million in the first quarter, FY21.

Jio widened customer market share to 34.82% (34.33%), while Airtel and Vi's marginally narrowed to 27.76% (27.78%) and 26.75% (27.09%) respectively, over the previous month respectively, Trai data showed.

Visitor Location Register (VLR), a key metric reflecting the number of active subscribers on a mobile network, indicated that 98.14% of the users were active for Airtel, 89.49% for Vi and 78.15% for Jio.

Data collated by the telecom regulator showed India's mobile user base fell by 3.2 million to 1.14 billion in June.