Reliance Jio Beats Airtel 5 to 1 in June Subscriber Additions

• Market leader Trust Jio surpassed airtel by a factor of 5 to 1, with 4.2 million subscribers in June.
• However, Airtel kept its lead on jio and Vi for the full year, with 7 million subscribers in the first six months of 2022, while Jio lost 2.7 million and Vi 9 million.
• Overall, the telecom sector witnessed a net positive addition of 2 million subscribers 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 dramatically widened the gap between the two telcos – Jio now has 50 million more subscribers than Airtel.

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

According to the latest data released by the Telecom Regulatory Body of India (TRAI), struggling telecom Vodafone idea continued to lose subscribers, declining 1.8 million over the month.

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

However, in the first six months of 2022, Airtel is still well ahead of both Jio and Vodafone Idea – while Airtel added more than 7 million subscribers during this period, Jio lost 2.7 million, while Vodafone Idea lost nearly 9 million.

Overall subscribers increase, but active subscribers marginally decrease

Overall, the Indian telecom sector saw a net increase of more than 2 million subscribers in June, but the number of active subscribers declined marginally.

Vodafone Idea’s losses continued to mount, both in terms of active subscribers and total subscribers.

This would be worrisome for Vodafone Idea, which has seen its market share in active subscribers fall steadily every month since early 2020 – between January 2020 and June 2022, Vodafone Idea’s market share has fallen from 30.1% to 21.5%.

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

An interesting statistic here is the correlation between an increase in Jio’s active subscriber rate and a decrease in subscriber numbers – in August 2021, Jio’s active subscriber rate was 79% and as of June 2022, it has increased to 92.8%.

During this period, Jio lost nearly 31 million subscribers, most of them between September and February.

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