RCom crosses 100-mn customer mark

Reliance Communications (RCom), a part of the Anil Dhirubhai Ambani Group, today announced that it had crossed the 100-million mobile subscribers mark, on the back of a surge in its GSM subscriber base, a service launched less than a year ago.

RCom is the second company after Bharti Airtel, India’s largest telecom company, to achieve the feat. Bharti Airtel, which had around 118 million subscribers as on December 2009, reached the 100 million customers mark in May last year. While Bharti took over 14 years to cross the mark, Reliance achieved it in half the time.

RCom launched its pan-India mobile services in 2003, but offered only CDMA services. According to industry sources, it took the company seven years to reach a CDMA subscriber base of around 70 million. However, in nine months, an aggressive GSM roll out helped it to add over 30 million customers — nearly three times more than the numbers that it was able to add a year to its CDMA network. “People make decisions based on the handset which were not available with CDMA. So, we lost out on eight out of 10 customers in the country. GSM service launched last year brought us into the consideration of this population,” said Mahesh Prasad, president-Wireless Business, Reliance Communications.

RCom aims to achieve the next 100 million customers within the next three years. “As we take the leap to achieve the 200 million mark, we will lead it from the front with more customer-centric innovations and service approach,” said Anil Ambani, chairman, Reliance ADA Group.