Reliance Jio beats Airtel 5 to 1 in June subscriber additions

• Industry leader Reliance Jio outpaced Airtel by a factor of 5 to 1, adding 4.2 million subscribers in June.
  
• However, Airtel maintained its lead over Jio and Vi for the whole year, adding 7 million subscribers in the first six months of 2022, while Jio lost 2.7 million and Vi lost 9 million.
  
• Overall, the telecom industry witnessed a net positive subscriber addition of 2 million in June.
  

Reliance Jio added 4.2 million subscribers in June, beating its closest rival Bharti Airtel by a margin of 5 to 1. This has also widened the gap between the two telcos drastically – Jio now has 50 million more subscribers than Airtel.

Jio had 413 million subscribers, compared to Airtel’s 363 million as of June end.

According to the latest data released by the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI), struggling telco Vodafone Idea continued to lose subscribers, with a decline of 1.8 million during the month.

Overall, during the first three months of FY23, Jio added 9 million subscribers while Airtel managed only 2.6 million. Vodafone Idea lost a little over 4 million subscribers in this period.

However, in the first six months of 2022, Airtel is still ahead of both Jio and Vodafone Idea by a big margin – while Airtel added over 7 million subscribers in this period, Jio lost 2.7 million while Vodafone Idea lost nearly 9 million.

Overall subscribers increase, but active subscribers decline marginally

Overall, the Indian telecom industry witnessed a net subscriber addition of over 2 million in June, but the active subscriber rate declined marginally.

Vodafone Idea’s losses continued to mount, both in terms of active subscribers as well as total 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 June 2022, Vodafone Idea’s active subscriber market share has fallen from 30.1% to 21.5%.

In the same period, Airtel has gone from 31.7% to 35.1% and Jio has increased its share from 31.4% to 37.7%.

An interesting metric here is the correlation between an increase in Jio’s active subscriber rate and its subscriber declines – in August 2021, Jio’s active subscriber rate stood at 79%, and as of June 2022, it has shot up to 92.8%.

In this period, Jio lost nearly 31 million subscribers – with the majority of those cuts being between September and February.

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