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Insights from TRAI's Latest Data: Who Won and Who Lost?

TRAI, the apex telecom regulator in India, released the monthly data for January 2021 for the telecom sector. All the talking points, inside.

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Hemant Kashyap
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On Friday, TRAI released its monthly data for the telecom sector. The data concerned itself with the performance of the sector as a whole in January 2021. In short, the sector gained over 9 million new wireless users, while Airtel bagging the most of them - for the 6th straight month. Vi broke in the black for the first time in more than a year. For Reliance Jio, the story seems a bit off.

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Winners: Bharti Airtel

The Sunil Mittal-led telco added 5,892,855 new subscribers during January 2021, which was around 1.74% of its total subscriber base. This gain takes its total base to 181.7 million and the market share to 29.62%. In more positives for the telco in the data, Airtel had over 97% active subscribers, which is the highest such ratio across the whole sector. This means that Airtel's customer base is much more engaged and active as compared to the other telcos.

In the recent 4G spectrum auction, Airtel was the second largest buyer. The telco already had substantial spectrum going in the auction. However, that did not stop it to buy spectrum worth more than Rs. 18,000 Crores. They focused primarily on the sub-1 GHz waves which can carry 5G signal via Dynamic Spectrum Sharing.

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On the flipside, along with Vodafone Idea, Airtel are looking at huge AGR dues, which can slow down both the telcos' 5G rollout if they fail to raise capital before that.

Losers: Reliance Jio

A rather harsh statement, given the Mukesh Ambani-led telco gained 1.96 million new subscribers to its user base. The telco was second in terms of that. Also, Jio is still the largest telco with more than 400 million subscribers, which is almost as many as Airtel's and Vodafone Idea's subscribers put together.

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However, move one layer deeper and the cracks start to show up. Its 0.48% growth is the slowest among the Big Three telcos. TRAI's data shows that Reliance Jio also comes at last in terms of active subscribers, with only 79% active subscribers. This lag has seen Airtel become the largest telco in terms of active subscribers.

All is not well at Reliance Jio, it seems. 5G is right around the corner and the telco needs to clear its act up or risk losing the "first to do it" advantage it had during 4G. But we know that this is a telco which is capable of pulling rabbits out of the hat at a moment's notice. Plus, it has the obvious (painfully so for Airtel and Vodafone Idea) liquidity advantage, so can bring out lucrative 5G offers that might just sway the tide in its favor.

Interesting data from TRAI on Vodafone Idea

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Vi signed up 1.7 million subscribers during January after losing 55.4 million wireless users since October 2019. The pace at which the telco lost the subscribers reduced in December and finally it is in the positive. Or so it seems.

The telco gained only in Uttar Pradesh (West) circle, which gained the most subscribers among circles. In all other circles, Voda-Idea lost users. That makes it looks like a fluke, however, it could also be misreporting, as the telco said publicly on Sunday. This is not a good look on the telco, which is already under fire due to a variety of reasons.

In a positive, Vi’s active subscribers were at 89.63%, which was the second highest ratio behind Airtel.

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