Cell user base grows 74% to 37.4 mn in 2004

The GSM cellular base in the country witnessed a 20 per cent growth in December 2004 with 1.4 million new additions during the month pushing up the number of subscribers to 37.4 million at the end of the year.

The GSM subscriber base grew over 76 per cent during 2004 from 21.2 million subscribers at the end of 2003.

The month also witnessed Reliance Infocomm, largely a WLL player, cross the 10 million mark. The number of fixed line wireline and CDMA phones is estimated to have crossed the 55 million mark taking the number of phone connections in India to over 92 million.

While BSNL is yet to release its numbers for December, MTNL's finished 2004 with a 4.26 million subscribers, with wireline phones accounting for nearly 96 per cent of its customer base.

Reliance Infocomm's subscriber base rose 4.8 per cent during December to close the year with 10.3 million subscribers.

As per Cellular Operators Association of India's data, Bharti continued to be the leading GSM with a subscriber base of 9.83 million and a market share of a little over a quarter at 26.29 per cent. The company's subscriber base grew

State-owned Bharat Sanchar Nigam Ltd was ranked a close second with nearly 8.44 million, of which 286,000 connections were given out in December.

Hutch, with 7.18 million subscribers, finished the year with a marketshare of 19.21 per cent, while Idea (4.7 million) and BPL (2.5 million) finished with a marketshare of 12.56 and 6.60 per cent, respectively.

The metros witnessed a mixed trend ""while Kolkata registered a significant growth with a 7.78 per cent rise over November, Delhi and Mumbai only witnessed marginal number of new mobile connections.

Interestingly, subscriber additions in Chennai took a tumble with the city registering a negative growth of 0.25 per cent over November.

In other regions, the West Bengal, Andaman and Nicobar Circle registered maximum the maximum growth in per cent terms (14.21).