Airtel outpaces Jio & VI in subscriber additions this year

• Airtel and Reliance Jio bounced back to add active subscribers in May while VI continued to lose, according to telecom subscriber data from TRAI.
• Airtel added 1 million new subscribers and Jio added 3 million subscribers while Vodafone Idea lost 0.8 million subscribers in May.
• Airtel has been a quiet winner in 2022 with over 6 million subscriber additions, while Jio and Vodafone Idea lost nearly 7 million each.

The Indian telecom landscape is heating up once again with the 5G spectrum auctions just a week away. But, there’s a quiet battle for subscribers going on in the background and Airtel seems to be taking the lead for the year.

According to the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) subscriber data, Airtel has added a little over 6.4 million subscribers in 2022 (until May), while its rivals Reliance Jio and Vodafone Idea have both lost nearly 7 million each.

The above chart shows Airtel’s subscriber additions have seen a slow but steady growth, while Reliance Jio’s subscriber numbers have been very volatile. Vodafone Idea, on the other hand, has been losing an average of over a million subscribers every month.

In May, Airtel and Jio together added over 4 million subscribers while Vodafone Idea lost 0.8 million.

Industry regains momentum, but Vodafone Idea’s losses continue

In some good news for the overall industry, the total active subscriber base increased by 4 million in May – while Airtel and Jio contributed over 6.6 million, Vodafone Idea lost 2.3 million active subscribers.

This would be worrying for Vodafone Idea which has seen its active subscriber market share consistently decline every month since the beginning of 2020 – between January 2020 and May 2022, Vodafone Idea’s active subscriber market share has fallen from 30.1% to 21.6%.

In the same period, Airtel has gone from 31.7% to 34.9% and Jio has increased its share from 31.4% to 37.7%.

Why are active subscribers so important for telcos?

As the name suggests, active subscribers have a plan active on their number. This means that they are actively paying money to telcos, instead of having a dormant number only to receive calls. In April, the overall active subscriber base fell by 7.5 million.

Indian telecom companies have been actively trying to weed out inactive subscribers by informing them over calls and messages to subscribe to a plan, failing which their numbers would be cut off.


Jio has often been used as a secondary SIM by many users, and this is evident from the fact that its active subscriber market share shot up from 84% in November 2021 to 93.8% in May 2022, when it lost nearly 20 million subscribers.

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