Despite Jio's threat, big 3 telcos grew by 12 per cent in H2: CLSA

NEW DELHI: The subscriber base of India's leading telecom operator Bharti Airtel, No. 2 Vodafone India and third ranked Idea Cellular expanded 12 per cent during the second half of 2016-17, despite new entrant Reliance Jio Infocomm coming up with free voice and data offers after its commercial launch in September 2016, brokerage CLSA said.

"Despite the new entrant's (Jio) 93 million additions, top three incumbents have still reported a 12 per cent year-on-year rise in subscriber additions to 39 million during the second-half of the 2017 fiscal," the Hong Kongbased brokerage said in a report.

Jio has more than 109 million users at present. Since Jio's commercial foray on September 5, 2016, with two back-to-back promotional offers stretching till March 31, the incumbent telcos have been competing hard through their own offers to retain and attract subscribers. Smaller telcos together lost 15 million customers, though, CLSA said.

The Tata group's Tata Teleservices' subscriber erosion was the highest among operators, declining 8 million, which could be due to a higher share of dongle users who might have shifted to Jio's services.

CLSA also said that overall mobile subscriber additions by service providers in the second half of the fiscal jumped more than threefold to 116 million from 37 million a year ago, driven by Jio's addition of 93 million customers due to free services. The high additions by the top three players as well as Jio underline the surge of multi-SIM usages, the brokerage said.

"This rise has also been exacerbated due to operators' reluctance to disconnect inactive/dormant subscribers. Consequently, the share of inactive subscribers has risen from 9.6 per cent in September to 12.4 per cent in December (last available data)," CLSA said.

The circle-wise breakup of Jio's subscriber base revealed that the services of Mumbai-based new entrant have been primarily used in urban markets.