India Wireless Telecom Market: December 2014

Maharashtra is the largest circle while Airtel continues to dominate

Source: TRAI

India’s active mobile subscriber base increased to 833.02 million in December 2014 …

·       Indian wireless telecom market ends December 2014 with subscriber base of 943.97 million, addition of 6.92 million, monthly growth rate of 0.74%

·       Overall mobile teledensity stands at 75.43% (Urban:  142.46%, Rural: 45.47%)

·       Urban to rural subscriber ratio is 58.33% to 41.67%

·       Rural market expanded by 3.28 million mobile subscribers at a monthly growth rate of

0.84% while urban subscriber base increased 3.64 million, growth of 0.67%

·       According to VLR data, India had 833.02 million active mobile subscribers. Hence, actual wireless teledensity in India is 60.92% by December 2014

·       In December 2014, about 3.49 million subscribers submitted Mobile Number Portability (MNP) requests which is about 0.37% of total mobile subscriber base in India

 

Bharti Airtel leads with 25.1% share as market continues to focus on active subscriber base eliminating inactive subscribers….

·       Bharti Airtel maintains its leadership position with 25.1% market share in India

·       Idea has largest proportion of active mobile users at 101.09% followed by Reliance (97.57%), Bharti Airtel (96.32%) and Vodafone (94.62%)

·       State-owned BSNL+MTNL with only 68.18% of active mobile subscriber base is certainly struggling in highly competitive and dynamic market environment raising lot of concerns about their future

·       While Tata (70.02%) and Aircel (65.79%) are way behind leading pack in terms of active user proportion raising doubts about long term sustainability of their business model

·       Idea (2.58 million), Bharti (1.76 million) and Vodafone (1.49 million) led in terms of net subscriber additions during December 2014 while BSNL (-1.31 million) performed poorly

·       Top 5 players in Indian wireless telecom industry accounts for 83.1% market share in terms of active subscriber base

 

Maharashtra holds leadership position followed by U.P. (East)…

·       Maharashtra with 70.25 million active mobile users is leading followed by U.P. (East) with 69.97 million active mobile subscribers

·       With 93.94% of active subscribers, Kerala is the most active circle while Tamil Nadu with 75.50% active users is least active

·       Andhra Pradesh (62.09 million) is third followed by Tamil Nadu (60.22 million) at fourth. Bihar with 58.80 million active mobile subscribers is the 5^th largest market wireless telecom market in India