Airtel Finally Beats Jio To Become #1 Telco With Active Users; Jio Losing Users At Fast Pace

Over a period of last six months, the telecom service provider Bharti Airtel has constantly been adding new subscribers to its existing base, while a similar trend is not shared by Reliance Jio.

Despite adding the highest number of wireless subscribers in February, the latter’s active user base is showing a downward trend, losing about 2 lakh subscribers.

Bharti Airtel Continues to Eclipse Reliance Jio

In November last year, Reliance Jio flaunted a market share of 33.5% active subscribers, outpacing Bharti Airtel, whose share was 33.4%.

After a period of three months, the positions reversed, as Airtel’s market share climbed to 34.6%, while that of Jio declined to 33%.

ICICI Securities stated that it was the first time Reliance Jio’s active subscribers declined for two consecutive months.

“In the past 12 months, RJio has added 12 million active subscribers; this compared to Bharti’s net subscribers add on active and mobile broadband was 25.1 million and 41.6million, respectively. For Jio, active subs and mobile broadband subs (active) are the same,” added ICICI Securities.

The domestic brokerage house, Motilal Oswal Financial Services Ltd stated on March 17 that Airtel added a total of 29 million active subscribers since May 2020, ranking first in terms of active subscriber market share.

While Airtel’s number of active subscribers soared to 340 million, Jio witnessed a loss of 3.5 million active subscribers, bringing down its number to 324 million.

The number of active subscribers for Vodafone Idea as of February 2021 is 256 million.

Furthermore, about 11.68 million mobile number portability (MNP) requests took place in February alone, spurring nearly over 3 million from the average run rate of 8 million per month.

Data analysis showed that Airtel gained a large number of subscribers from both Jio and Vodafone Idea through the MNP route.