July 7, 2014: The month of May has been a very interesting month for telecom operators in India with active mobile subscriptions being 86.9 per cent of the total subscriber base. The total number of mobile subscriptions stood at 790.5 million. When the overall tele-density in India stood at 75.51 per cent at the end of May which is 0.13 per cent more than what was in April, there was a heavy churn witnessed in the subscriber base of different telecom operators. This churn was mainly due to the fall in service quality of certain operators and the subscribers opting to change their service providers through mobile number portability (MNP). The number of subscribers who opted for MNP stood at 2.23 million in May.
Among the operators who gained customers include Idea Cellular who added 1.16 million subscribers and Vodafone which added 982,381 subscribers. The total number of subscribers for Idea stood at 108.3 million and it got a market share of 11.9 per cent and was the number 3 operator in terms of market share. Vodafone’s total subscriber based stood at 168.2 million and it got a market share of 18.49 per cent. Uninor also increased the number of subscribers and garnered a market share of 4.16 per cent market share. Bharti Airtel gained a market share of 22.88 per cent with the overall subscriber base touching 208 million. The company added 1.65 million subscribers in May. The other telecom operators who gained subscriber base marginally include Aircel, Tata Tele Services, Videocon, Loop Mobile, MTNL and Sistema Shyam.
The operators who lost customers include Reliance Communication and state owned BSNL. Rcom which is India’s fourth largest telecom operator lost over two million users in May and its market share stood at 11.9 per cent. The other operator who lost customers was BSNL which saw its subscriber based decrease from 1.57 million to 91.6 million. These figures which were released by the regulator through a report also revealed that private operators hold the maximum market share of 89.56 per cent when compared to state run operators BSNL and MTNL which hold 10.44 per cent market share.
