Subscriber base consolidates; RJio leads the growth: Motilal Oswal Financial Services

According to the telecom report of Motilal Oswal Financial Services (MOFSL), while active subscribers for both Bharti/VIL remained fairly flat at 347m/236m, RJio continued its strong addition of 4.7m subscribers (4.1m in Aug’21).

RJio continues to lead, with an active subscriber share of 35.7% when compared to 34.8% for Bharti. As a result, total VLR for RJio improved by 460bp to 83.65% in Sep’21. While gross subscribers for RJio fell steeply (19m) to 425m, it continued its lead in active subscriber additions at 4.7m to 355m, increasing its market share by 30bp to 35.7%. 4G subscribers too declined by 19m.

The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) released subscriber data for Sep’21 where MOFSL observed that gross subscriber base for the industry fell steeply (20.7m) to 1,166m on account of a 19m decline in RJio’s gross subscriber base due to a cleanup of inactive subscribers. However, active subscribers grew by 3.9m to 996m (2.4m additions in Aug’21).

Bharti’s gross/active subscribers remained flat at 354m/347m in comparison with average additions of 2-3m in the last couple of months. While its active subscriber share declined by 20bp to 34.8%. 4G subscriber additions too witnessed sluggish growth and grew by 1m to 203m as compare to a steady run-rate of 4m. Bharti’s 4G subscriber base continued to grow, albeit at a slower rate of 1.2m (4m in Aug’21), while the same for RJio/VIL declined by 19m/1.2m.

VIL’s gross/active subscribers continued to decline at 1.1m/0.8m to 270m/236m, albeit at a slightly slower pace. 4G subscriber additions, which grew in May-Jun’21, declined by 1.2m.

4G subscribers for the industry as a whole declined by 18.7m to 769.2m, with 4G subscribers accounting for 77.3% of active subscribers.

Industry Wired Broadband subscribers remained flat, down a mere 0.1m to 24.4m. RJio/Bharti added 160k/230k subscribers, taking share from BSNL’s 440k decline.

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