No 2 carrier Vodafone<\/a> India, and third-largest, Idea Cellular, which are merging to form the country’s largest telco, however, suffered sizeable customer losses in May amid continuing price wars, as per data released by the telecom regulator Wednesday.
Accordingly, Airtel and Jio recorded strong market share gains to 30.46% (27.44%) and 18.17% (17.44%), while Vodafone India and Idea reported declines on this metric to 19.67% (19.74%) and 18.94% (19.27%) respectively.
Sunil Mittal-led Bharti Airtel added a 35.86 million users, consolidating its position as India’s biggest phone company with 344.55 million subscribers, while 4G rival Jio’s customer base swelled to 205.54 million. Vodafone India and Idea, on the contrary, lost 0.42 million and 2.5 million users taking their customer bases to 222.45 million and 214.22 million respectively.
State-run Bharat Sanchar Nigam (BSNL<\/a>) reported 0.48 million customer additions, depicting flattish market share growth at 9.98% in May.
Fringe players like Reliance Communications did not add a single customer in May, while Tata Teleservices lost over 1.49 million subscribers.
Visitor Location Register, a key metric reflecting the number of active subscribers on a mobile network, indicated that 95.29% of users were active for Airtel, 94.09% for Vodafone India, 95.99% for Idea, 83.55% for Jio and 59.21% for BSNL.
Data collated by the telecom regulator showed that the total base of phone subscribers rose to 1,153.51 million in end-May from 1,147.71 million in end-April, reflecting a tiny 0.51% monthly growth.
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