India adds 20 Mn Mobile subscribers in March –MNP requests sky-rocket!

According to the latest report (March 2011) released by TRAI – India now has a total of 846.32 Million Telecom subscribers, comprising of of 811.59 Mobile subscribers & 34.73 wireline subscribers. The Indian Tele-density now stands at 70.89%!

If anything, the growth in mobile subscription is only increasing. Monthly Mobile Subscriber additions in last few months has been averaging about 17-18 million, but in month of March, subscriber additions crossed 20.2 million. Total Mobile subscriber base increased from 791.38 mn in Feb 2011 to 811.59 mn at the end of March 2011, registering a growth of 2.55%. 

Urban Vs Rural Mobile Subscribers

Urban subscribers are still going strong with 12.88 mn additions , while 7.33 mn rural folks were added to the tally! While the Urban Teledensity currently stands at 150%, rural teledensity is close to 33%. Essentially what it means is, in cities, for every 2 individuals there are 3 mobile numbers – And in rural areas, there is 1 mobile number for every 3 individuals!

For Pan-India telecom subscriber base, 66.65 percent subscribers reside in Urban areas, whereas 33.35 are in rural areas.

Mobile Number Portability Requests

Less than expected number of people actually took advantage of MNP in first couple of months of MNP launch. However, MNP requests are now picking up steam. 64.23 Lakh MNP requests were made in March 2011 as compared to 38.33 lakh in Feb 2011.

Active Mobile Subscriber Base

This is a key figure, which gives you an idea about how many Mobile numbers are actually active (“Active” means – the mobile number which was used atleast once in previous month). Out of total 811.59 mobile subscribers, 573.97 had active numbers – which means 70% of all mobile numbers are active in India.

Idea has maximum amount of Active subscribers with 93.07% of all Idea subscribers being active followed by Airtel which had 90.72 active subscribers. Etisalat had lowest active subscriber base of 34.15%.

Mobile Subscriber Market Share

Bharti now has nearly 1 in every 5 subscribers in India and a clear lead of over 3% point over second positioned Reliance (16.72%), while Vodafone seems to be inching very close to grabbing the second spot. The difference between both is merely 0.14 percent! The surprising aspect is that Tata’s market position is fallen down from 3rd to 5th now behind BSNL (11.32%) & IDEA (11..03%)

Mobile Subscriber Additions (March 2011)

Vodafone’s aggressive ZooZoo marketing campaign during IPL seems to have done the magic for them gaining 18.06%  of all subscribers in March. Vodafone also seems to have been gained the maximum due to MNP churn. They are followed by Reliance (17.53) and Bharti (15.86%). Tata (7.34%) surprisingly are adding much lower numbers to tally, even lesser than BSNL (7.55%) !