The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) came out with its monthly telecom performance report for the month of December on Thursday. Looking at the report, ICICI Securities has said that Reliance Jio adding 4.7 million active subscribers is a positive surprise. It is worth noting that the telco’s overall subscriber base reduced by 12.9 million users. However, in terms of active subscribers, Jio added 4.7 million new users. This has also helped the telco in improving its VLR subscriber percentage aggressively. By cleaning the inactive subscribers from the total user base and adding new active subscribers, Jio’s VLR subscriber percentage rose to 87.64% in the month of December 2021. It was more than that of Vodafone Idea’s (Vi) VLR subscriber percentage of 86.42%.
Bharti Airtel Only Added 0.8 Million Active Subscribers
Bharti Airtel was the only private telecom operator which added users to the overall subscriber base. However, in terms of active subscriber addition, Airtel only saw a growth of 0.8 million users. This is a very small number compared to the active subscriber addition that Jio saw. Reliance Jio’s active subscriber market share grew to 36.4%, followed by Airtel 34.8% and Vodafone Idea’s 21.9%. Overall industry-wide mobile broadband (MBB) subscribers dipped by 11.4 million to 765 million in December 2021. This was likely due to the prepaid tariff hikes that kicked in around the start of the month. Bharat Sanchar Nigam Limited (BSNL) displayed a strong performance by adding 1.1 million new users, more than what either of the private telecom operators did. BSNL benefited from the prepaid tariff hikes of the private telcos. ICICI Securities said that industry porting was steady at 8.6 million during the month. However, Charu Pariwali, an analyst at Counterpoint Research, said the higher porting requests MoM (month-over-month) came because of the prepaid tariff hikes. Mobile Number Portability (MNP) churn rate of 0.7% wasn’t a big difference from 0.6% in November 2021.
