Indian Mobile Subscriber Stats: 824.4M Active, 937.06M Total. Reliance loses 4.3M [Nov 14]

TRAI has released their monthly telecom subscription report for the month of November 2014, and according to it, India now has a total of 937.06 million mobile subscribers. up 1.71 million compared to previous month.

Interestingly, TRAI did not release its monthly telecom data last month (Oct 2014), so our previous coverage is of September 2014. Based on our calculations, last month 5.15 million new mobile subscribers were added.

If you consider purely new mobile subscriber additions in month of November, they are over 9 million, however, Reliance and BSNL lost subscribers heavily – 4.3 million and 2.3 million respective bringing down net additions to 1.71 million.

Cumulatively, India has has 50.7 mobile subscribers since start of 2014. Here is the mobile subscriber growth chart over past 18 months.

Except for Sept last year, every month has shown positive growth.

Active Subscriber Base

Number of active subscribers in the month of November stands at 824.38 million, a growth of over 12.27 million in previous 2 months. The percentage of active subscriber is now 87.98!

In last 18 month active percentage has grown by over 4.3 percent thanks to aggressive steps by TRAI to weed out inactive numbers from the system.

Here is a chart showing Total Vs Active Subscriber Growth.

Mobile Subscription Highlights [Sept 2014]

– With an increase of 1.71 mln in November 2014, total mobile subscriber base has reached to 937.06 million. India had 930.20 million subscribers by end of September 2014.

– Urban India witnessed a monthly decrease of 0.32 percent or 1.78 mln subscribers, while rural mobile subscriber base increased by 0.90 percent or 3.49 mln.

– Urban Teledensity decreased to 141.75 from 142.39 in Sept 14, while the rural tele-density increased to 45.13 from previous 44.32.

– Urban mobile subscriber share stands at 58.37% as compared 41.62% of rural subscribers.

– 3.64 million new Mobile portability requests were made in month of November 2014, taking the total tally of MNP requests since launch to 139.49 mln.

– Active Mobile Subscriber base increased from 812.11 mln in Sept 14 to 824.38 mln in Nov 14, taking the active percentage to 87.98 percent.

–  Total Broadband (> 512 Kbps) subscription numbers increased from 79.21 Million at the end of October 2014 to 82.22 million at the end of November 2014 with monthly growth rate of 3.79%

Operator Wise Subscriber Additions [November 2014]

For fifth month in a row, Idea Cellular added maximum number of mobile subscribers to their kitty – 2.54 million to be precise. This was also the first month when 3 operators added more than 2 million subscribers each – Vodafone added 2.33 million followed by Airtel’s 2.05 million.

Interesting aspect about Idea Cellular is that they have 100.89 percent Active subscribers. While it does not make sense, TRAI reasons that it is because they also have roaming subscribers on their network, who are not originally on Idea Cellular.

Reliance Communication was the biggest loser who lost 4.3 million subscribers followed by BSNL who have been witnessing fall in their subscribers for nearly 6 months now – They lost 2.32 million.

Among other operators Aircel added shade below 1 million subscribers. Tata Docomo seems to have finally come out of their long string of negative growth. They were the telco who fourth highest number of subscribers at 0.786 million.

Here is how various Telco’s have performed since Feb 2014

Among top 9 operators, Idea Cellular has had a stellar year 2014 adding nearly 14 million new subscribers since Feb 2014. India’s largest operator Bharti Airtel is placed third after Idea and Vodafone.

Top 8 Mobile Operators in Numbers

#	Operator	Total Subscriber Count (till Sept 2014)
1	Bharti Airtel	215,458,762
2	Vodafone	177,189,796
3	Idea	147,952,692
4	Reliance	106,135,742
5	BSNL	82,690,230
6	Tata	65,569,236
7	Aircel	77,757,678
8	Telewings / Uninor	42,429,363

 

[TRAI pdf Report]