Lockdown blues: Airtel, VIL lose 5.26 m, 4.51 m users in April , Jio adds 1.57 m

KOLKATA: Bharti Airtel and Vodafone Idea lost a whopping 5.26 million and 4.51 million customers respectively in April 2020, as many migrant workers and low-income users are reckoned to have surrendered their mobile connections amid economic hardship caused by the nationwide pandemic-induced lockdowns.

Market leader Reliance Jio managed to add 1.57 million customers even in these tough market conditions, but this was well below its near 4.7 million subscriber adds in March 2020.

Data collated by the telecom regulator showed India's mobile user base plunged by 8.23 million to around 1.149 billion in April.

“Many migrant workers and low-ARPU customers may have found it tough to sustain multiple connections during lockdowns, and may have surrendered one to save money, which led to the fall in the April mobile user base,” said an analyst with a Mumbai-based brokerage, who did not wish to be named.

Airtel and VIL’s mobile user base fell to 322.54 million and 314.65 million, as per latest telco subscriber data collated by the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (Trai) and issued Friday. Jio’s April user base grew modestly to 389.09 million, yet again signalling that Jio consumers had largely taken in their stride the tariff hikes the telecom market leader took last December.

Last December, Airtel, VIL and Jio had increased bundled prepaid tariffs for the first time in 3 years by around 14-33%.

Airtel and VIL had reported customer bases of 283.66 million and 291.1 million respectively in their March quarter earnings numbers respectively, while Jio had reported a user base of 388 million in the fiscal fourth quarter.

Jio widened customer market share to 33.85% (33.47%), while Airtel and VIL’s marginally narrowed to 28.06% (28.31%) and 27.37% (27.57%) respectively, over the previous month respectively, Trai data showed.

Visitor Location Register (VLR), a key metric reflecting the number of active subscribers on a mobile network, indicated that 95.26% of the users were active for Airtel, 88.85% for VIL and 78.75% for Jio.