New Delhi: Airtel is fast gaining ground in India when it comes to wooing new users while the industry disruptor Jio is losing customers owing to “poor network experience”, a new report has revealed.
According to global mobile analytics company Opensignal, data shows that until August 2020, Airtel and Jio had been steadily gaining smartphone users, and in this period, both operators were neck and neck in the net users gained.
“From September onwards, when carriers once again decided to hike prices, Airtel continued to gain users until the end of the year. However, that trend on Jio’s network more or less flattened and then gradually started to decline — the negative trend was more pronounced from mid-November onwards,” the report said late on Tuesday.
By the end of 2020, Airtel had gained the highest proportion of users.
In contrast, Vi (earlier called Vodafone) had been steadily losing customers since the beginning of the year and only started to see a deceleration of this trend from mid-November onwards.
Currently, India is the world’s second-largest telecommunications market, with a subscriber base of 1.16 billion.
According to the latest TRAI data, the wireless subscriber base of Jio now stands at 404.1 million. It is 326.6 million for Airtel and 295.5 million for Vodafone Idea.
The market has registered strong growth in the last decade, but it also has high churn rates birthed by carriers adopting an aggressive pricing strategy, especially after Jio’s disruptive entry in 2016 that ate away the profits and forced many operators out of the market, often as a result of acquisitions.
