Reliance Jio leads the numbers game in June 2022

The telecom use base continued to growth in the month of June, the latest month for which TRAI has reported monthly subscriber accretion data. For the month of June, the subscriber base grew by 117.07 crore subscribers at the end of May 2022 to 117.29 crore subscribers at the end of June 2022. Effectively, the telecom industry has added nearly 22 lakh subscribers to the total telecom base and this is the total telecom base for the month including the wireless base and the much smaller fixed line customer base. 

However, the industry level accretion of 22 lakh subscribers does not give the granular picture of how the telecom industry panned out in the month of June 2022. For instance, Reliance Jio added 42.23 lakh customers while Bharti Airtel added 7.93 lakh customers. Between them, they added 50.16 lakh subscribers. But the other side of the story is that much of this growth has not come from expansion of the overall telecom market. the growth has actually come from the leaders cannibalizing the growth of other players.

Let us not look at the other side of the story. If Jio and Bharti Airtel were the gainers in the market share game in telecom the big losers were Vodafone Idea and BSNL. For instance, during the month of June 2022, Vodafone Idea alone lost nearly 18 lakhs subscribers. In addition, BSNL lost over 13.27 lakh subscribers in the month of June. In short, the growth of Jio and Bharti was largely by cannibalizing the respective market shares of Vodafone Idea and BSNL to a greater extent and MTNL to a lesser extent.

Telecom subscriber base in the country grew marginally to 117.29 crore in June 2022. Out of this a very small portion of 2.55 crore subscribers were fixed line or landline subscribers while the rest were wireless subscribers. Let us now look at the wireless standings at the close of June 2022. Reliance Jio's wireless subscriber base stands at 41.3 crore while Bharti Airtel subscribers base stood at 36.29 crore. Both these companies have seen accretion in subscription numbers during the month of June 2022.

The subscriber base of Vodafone Idea stood at 25.66 crore. Vodafone, incidentally, has been losing its customer base consistently over the last few quarters as subscribers have increasingly shifted to Bharti and Jio after too many cash flow problems were found in Vodafone Idea. The remaining subscribers numbering around 12 crore in all were spread across other telecom service providers in India like Tata Teleservices, Bharat Sanchar Nigam Ltd (BSNL) and Mahanagar Telephone Nigam Ltd (MTNL) and a few others.

Finally, let us also look at the broadband subscriber base which grew from 77.11 crore in the end of May 2022 to 80 crore at the end of June 2022. The top 5 players accounted for 98.5% of the broadband base. However, due to its broadband start, Reliance Jio has cornered 52.3% of the broadband market. Out of 80 crore broadband subscribers, Reliance Jio Infocomm Ltd had 41.91 crore subscribers, Bharti Airtel 21.94 crore subscribers, Vodafone Idea 12.29 crore subscribers, BSNL 2.5 crore subscribers and Atria Convergence 21.1 lakh subscribers. Jio clearly leads the race by a margin.