Major telcos see decline in new subscribers in July

After a robust growth in June, GSM mobile operators saw the number of new subscribers going down to 2.08 million in July, compared to 3.5 million new additions a month ago. The GSM subscriber base rose to 779.05 mn by July end, said the Cellular Operators Association of India. All the major operators saw a decline in new subscribers.

Airtel, which added 1.07 mn new customers in July as opposed to 1.4 mn in June, continued to led the growth among operators, with the total mobile subscriber base of 256.81 mn. Vodafone added 0.32 mn new ones compared with 0.7 mn last month, to increase its base to 199.7 mn. Idea Cellular added 0.25 mn against 0.69 mn in June and its base has increased to 176.4 mn.

Aircel added 0.4 mn, Telenor added 0.01 mn and state-run MTNL added zero users as compared with 0.67mn, 0.03 mn and 8,698 new users respectively.

This comes despite telcos aggressively trying to retain and increase their user base, ahead of the Reliance Jio commercial launch later this year.

Reliance Communications, Tata Teleservices and Bharat Sanchar Nigam operate a mobile telecom network with GSM technology but the COAI data doesn't cover these. , COAI's data now covers six operators -Airtel, Vodafone, Idea Cellular, Aircel, Telenor and MTNL, which jointly account for about 70 per cent of mobile market share.