Reliance Jio starts Recovering September's Losses as Airtel, Vi fall in October

On Monday, TRAI released the Telecom Subscription Data for October 2021. While the telecom sector recorded marginal improvement, Reliance Jio remained the only telco to gain users. During the same month, Bharti Airtel and Vodafone Idea lost users.

Reliance Jio Gains Users; Airtel, Vi Fall

In October, the sector had a total of 1,166.30 million wireless subscribers, up from 1.166.02 million in the month before. While this represents only a marginal increase of 0.02%, it still means that the sector has finally arrested the fall. Furthermore, the rural subscribers increased by about 0.73 million in October. However, during the same time, the urban subscribers decreased by 0.45 million.

At the same time, only Jio gained 1.76 million users, while Airtel lost about 0.49 million users. Also, Vodafone Idea lost almost a million users. In terms of growth, Jio saw a 0.41% growth, while all the others saw losses, with Reliance Communications losing over 10% of its users.

Wireless remains the domain of private players, with only 10.01% of the market share going to PSU telcos. Jio led the market share with 36.58%, followed by Bharti Airtel at 30.35%, and Vodafone Idea at 23.07%. During the past month, Jio had 36.43% of the market share. Furthermore, Airtel and Vi had 30.40% and 23.15%, respectively. As such, Jio's market share has increased, while Airtel and Vi lost a bit of the ground in the market. Hence, Jio's user base stands at 426.63 million, Airtel's user base stands at 353.97 million, and Vi's user base stands at 269.07 million.

Along with this, BSNL had a market share of 9.73%, and MTNL had a market share of 0.28%. Reliance Communications completed the pie with a 0.0005% market share. This means that BSNL had 113.5 million users, and MTNL had 3.27 million users. While Reliance Communications had only about 6000 subscribers across the country.

In terms of active users, Bharti Airtel has managed to remain at the top for 10 out of the 10 months reported by TRAI. Airtel had 97.78% of its users as active users, while Reliance Communications and Vodafone Idea had roughly 87%. Reliance Jio, on the other hand, had 84.03% active users, which has been an improvement over the months. Since September, the ratio has improved greatly, mostly because it lost almost 2 million users in that month.

Telecom Sector Breaks the Fall

During the months of August and September, the telecom sector saw significant customer losses. In terms of severity, September was the worst month of the year, when the sector lost 20 million subscribers. However, the most recent report from TRAI has seen the sector cut down on the losses, and make a marginal recovery.

September was the third month in 2021 to record an overall decline in telecom users. What’s more, the telecom sector has lost wireless users for two months in a row; previously, August saw marginal losses of 1.1 lakh users, while May recorded 67 lakh users lost. Incidentally, before September, May was the only month in 2021 when the sector saw losses across all 22 telecom circles.

However, the telecom sector’s losses can be attributed to a reduced instance of multiple connections. Therefore, the decline should not prove to be much cause of worry for the telecom sector as a whole. Since then, though, the effects of the pandemic have reduced, and people are buying new connections.