NEW DELHI: Fight for mobile subscriber<\/a> is expected to remain intense going forward, irrespective of tariff changes in the country with Vodafone Idea<\/a> looking to arrest subscriber loss and aggressive push from both Bharti Airtel<\/a> and Reliance Jio<\/a>, Kotak said in a note.
Airtel’s catch-up with Jio on network coverage as well as capacity to enhance
customer experience seems to be yielding results, as it seems to gain a quality subscriber base, Kotak said.
\"Bharti’s performance post the tariff hikes in December 2019 has been impeccable on almost all parameters including subscriber additions, sequential ARPU\/ revenue growth and incremental EBITDA margins and its operating metrics such as average data and voice usage have improved as well ahead of the industry<\/a>,\" Kotak said.
Morgan Stanley<\/a> said that Airtel has been winning in the marketplace in overall data subscriber additions with 24 million vs 13.6 million additions by Jio and 7.4 million additions by Vodafone Idea<\/a> during the last five months.
\"We think the driver here could be Airtel's increasingly ambitious go-to-market strategy, which could continue in the coming months,\" Morgan Stanley<\/a> said.
Telcos added 8.1 million mobile broadband subscribers in October 2020 compared to 9.5 million additions in September 2020.
As per Trai<\/a>'s October data, Airtel added 4.2 million data subscribers,vs. its 2QF21 monthly average of 4.9 million, while data subscribers of Vodafone-Idea (Vi) increased marginally, by 0.6 million vs. its 2QF21 monthly average of +1.1 million.
Jio added 2.2 million mobile broadband subscribers. Morgan Stanley said that Jio's wireless broadband subscriber additions were in line with its monthly addition run rate of 2.3 million in 2QF21 but were much lower than its monthly addition run rate of 3.8 million YTD.
Analysts said that Jio will try to grab users by re-launching JioPhones<\/a> early next year and rolling out a low-cost smartphone in partnership with Google later.
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