India’s largest operator Bharti Airtel beat out disruptive new entrant Reliance Jio Infocomm in April in terms of active subscriber additions for the first time since Jio launched services last September.
Analysis from Goldman Sachs finding that Airtel added 2.6 million active subscribers for the month, according to India’s voice location register. This compares to just 400,000 for Jio.
Data subscriber additions are also starting to increase for Airtel now that Jio is starting to charge for data, and the analysts believe that Jio could continue to face challenges with subscriber growth in the future – Jio’s active VLR additions have now been decelerating for four straight months.
Jio’s active subscribers as a percentage of total subscribers have also been in decline, falling to only 71% in April, compared to nearly 98% for the market’s top three operators Airtel, Voafone India and Idea Cellular.
But the report cites sources close to Jio as stating that the company doesn’t give much significance to VLR figures and stating that its total base of paid customers actually increased by around 8 million during April to over 80 million.