Jio, the 2.5 yrs old aggressively placed mobile operator from India’s Reliance Industries, has become the company’s second-largest operator by mobile subscriber count. And it has done that at the behest of the two decades old Bharti Airtel. The data has come in from a TRAI (Telecom Regulatory Authority of India) report published on Friday.
As of May, Reliance Jio has around 322.9 million users and has experienced an increase of 8 million users in a month. On the other hand, Airtel has 320 million users and faced a loss of 1.5 million users since April.
The first position is claimed by Vodafone Idea, with 387.5 million users in India. Though the telecom operator lost 5.6 million users between April and May.
In March, Jio had reported a profit of ₹8.4 billion ($121 million) in its March quarter. Reliance Industries,the parent company for Jio, will be announcing its financial earnings for the first quarter later today. In the mArch quarter, its ARPU (average revenue per user) was ₹126.2 which fell from ₹130 in December 2018 quarter. Yet it continues to exceed its competitors.
Jio is marching forward as the only profitable telecom service provider with a monthly growth of 2.6%. Whereas rivals like Airtel (-0.47%) and Vodafone-Idea (-1.45%) both are facing losses in the subscriber count.
Jio is supposed to roll-out its FTTH (fiber-to-the-home) service this year. This service will be delivering wall-to-wall broadband service for mobile devices with maximum speeds of 100Mbps. The company is planning to launch the service in 1,100 cities across India.
Currently, Vodafone-Idea has a market share (as per subscribers count) of 33.6%, with Jio following at 27.8%. Even though Airtel has a share of 27.58% (almost close to that of Jio), the subscriber count of Jio is expected to grow compared to Airtel.
