Reliance Jio becomes India’s number one mobile operator

Less than three years after launching Reliance Jio has overtaken Vodafone Idea and Bharti Airtel to become India’s biggest MNO by subscriber.

Jio announced it had hit 331 subscribers last week as part of its quarterly numbers announcement but, according to Ovum’s WCIS, that would still have left it just behind the recently combined Vodafone Idea group if the latter had even held onto its existing punters. Jio overtook long time Indian market leader Bharti Airtel in the first quarter of this year.

Vodafone Idea announced its own numbers late last week and they revealed that it continues to haemorrhage subscribers. “Our subscriber base declined to 320.0 million from 334.1 million in Q4FY19 primarily due to customer churn following the introduction of ‘service validity vouchers’ in the prior quarters,” opened the ‘operational highlights’ section of the report.

“We are delivering on our stated strategy although the benefits are not yet visible in our top line,” said Vodafone Idea CEO Balesh Sharma. “We remain focused on expanding our 4G coverage to over a billion Indians as well as expanding our data capacities by adding more sites on TDD and deploying Massive MIMO. We are well on track to deliver our synergy targets by Q1FY21. We expect these factors to increasingly contribute to our financial performance going forward.”

Returning to the WCIS numbers, the total number of mobile subscribers hasn’t increased that much in the three years that Jio has been operating, which means the third of a billion customers it now has have been largely taken from the incumbents. There has been a fair bit of consolidation, so it’s hard to make like-for-like comparisons, but it looks like Jio largely took subscribers from the smaller players initially, but in the past year has been hoovering up tens of millions of subscribers from its two big rivals.

Competition is obviously a good thing but if this trend continues Jio could become dangerously dominant in India and the country’s regulators and politicians may live to regret making it so easy for the country’s richest person to get off to such a flying start. The genie is out of the bottle now, though, and it’s hard to see how Vodafone Idea and Bharti Airtel are going to regain the initiative.