While Mukesh Ambani’s a little less than three-year-old telecom company Reliance Jio is expanding its subscriber base at a competitive pace, the comparatively older telcos Vodafone-Idea and Bharti Airtel continue to lose their users. For the month of June, every other player except Reliance Jio and BSNL has shown a negative growth including Vodafone-Idea and Sunil Mittal’s Bharti Airtel. In wireless subscription, Jio got 82 lakh fresh subscriptions while Vodafone-Idea lost over 41 lakh users. However, at Vodafone-Idea’s staggering 19 crore wireless subscribers and Bharti Airtel’s 14 crore wireless users, Reliance Jio, with its 12 crore-strong user base, is still behind both the major telecom operators in terms of wireless subscriptions, according to TRAI’s latest telecom subscription data.
In broadband services (both wired and wireless combined) too, the telecom arm of Reliance Industries Limited is the leading player with more than half the market size. “As on 30th June, 2019, the top five Wireless Broadband Service providers were Reliance Jio Infocomm Ltd (331.26 million), Bharti Airtel (119.09 million), Vodafone Idea (110.50 million), BSNL (12.87 million) and Tata Teleservices (1.40 million),” TRAI said.
Recently, RIL Chairman Mukesh Ambani said that Reliance Jio has become the second-largest telecom company in the globe. In India, Reliance Jio is the biggest telecom company by revenue, profits and aggregate subscriber base, Mukesh Ambani said at RIL’s 42nd Annual General Meeting. Reliance Jio is about one-third the size of China Mobile Communications Corporation, which is the biggest telecom company in the world. With a total of over 34 crore subscribers across broadband and wireless services, Jio is also adding 1 crore subscribers every month.
While Jio has already disrupted the Indian telecom industry, the Mukesh Ambani company now stares at grabbing a significant chunk of the Indian telecom industry which is pegged at Rs 5 lakh crore. The company now looks to fire its other four growth drivers with the roll-out of Internet of Things, Home broadband, Enterprise broadband service and Broadband for small and medium enterprises.
