Top 20 Mobile Operators in World –Bharti 5th in subscribers, but 17th on revenue!

India has 2nd largest subscriber base after China in the world, yet only one Indian telecom company – Bharti Airtel -  figures in the Top 20 Mobile Operators in the world based on revenues.

Top Mobile Operators in world based on Revenue

The number revealed by Wireless Intelligence places China Mobile as the world’s leading Mobile Operator with 584 Million subscriber base and close to 20 billion in revenue. Vodafone Group which operates in many countries in Europe & Asia came in second with revenues of over 15.2 billion and followed by Verizon (14.2 bln) AT&T (13.8 bln) & Telefonica with 12.2 bln revenue.

India’s Bharti Airtel came in at 17th with a revenue of 2.9 Billion.

Rank	Mobile Operator	Revenue (USD Bln)	YoY Rev Growth %	Subscriber Base	Rev per Subscriber
1	China Mobile	19.9	6	584	34.1
2	Vodafone Group	15.2	1.6	353	43.1
3	Verizon Wireless	14.2	4.8	102.2	138.9
4	AT&T Group	13.8	9.6	95.5	144.5
5	Telefónica Group 3	12.2	29.5	220.2	55.4
6	NTT DOCOMO Group	11.5	-1.6	57.2	201.0
7	Deutsche Telekom Group	9.3	-6.9	133.2	69.8
8	France Telecom Group	8.1	5.2	110.2	73.5
9	América Móvil Group 3, 4	7.2	–	225	32.0
10	Sprint (Sprint Nextel)	6.5	3	49.9	130.3
11	au (KDDI)	5.7	-6.4	32.5	175.4
12	Telecom Italia Group	4.9	2	82	59.8
13	SoftBank Mobile	4	14	24.4	163.9
14	MTN Group	3.9	5.9	111.1	35.1
15	Vivendi Group	3.4	-1.7	38.6	88.1
16	China Unicom	3.3	21.5	167.4	19.7
17	Bharti Airtel Group	2.9	63.6	199.6	14.5
18	SK Telecom	2.8	3.6	25.7	108.9
19	STC Group	2.6	-0.8	31.1	83.6
20	Telenor Group	2.5	11.1	108.8	23.0

 

Top Mobile Operators in world based on Subscribers

China Mobile has a whooping subscriber base of 584 Million, which is over 65% of entire subscriber base of China pegged at 900 million according to most recent number, Vodafone group boasts a total subscriber base of 353 Million out of which close to half is based in India alone. America Movil group comes in at 3rd with 225 million, followed Telefonica Group at 220.2 million mobile subscribers.

India’s Bharti Airtel comes in at 5th having just shy of 200 million subscribers.

Top Mobile Operators based on ARPU

We charted following graph on ARPUs based on the numbers released by Wireless Intelligence and it shows stark difference amongst the top 20 Mobile Operators in the world !

Bharti Airtel earns USD 14.5 per subscriber in an year, equivalent to about Rs. 650 in an year. This is by far the lowest revenue earned by any of the top Mobile operators in the world. China Mobile earns over Rs. 1530 on its 584 Million Subscriber base.

One the other hand, NTT DOCOMO which is primarily based in Japan, earns over 9000 rupees per subscriber and ranks 6th largest in terms of revenue on its relatively miniscule 57 million subscriber base. This is about 14 times more than Bharti Airtel !

7 out of top 20 mobile operators earn over Rs. 4500 (USD 100) per subscriber. The average per subscriber earning amongst top 20 mobile providers is Rs. 3813!