Reliance Jio leads wireless broadband market with 56% market share

Wireless broadband subscriber base continues to maintain its strong growth trajectory, increasing to 532.0 million in February 2019, witnessing addition of 10.2 million during the month, with Reliance Jio leads the wireless broadband market, with a market share of 56 percent, followed by Bharti and Vodafone-Idea at 21 percent each, according to a new report by ICRA.

The wireless broadband subscriber base continues to maintain its strong growth trajectory, increasing to 532 million in February 2019, or 45 percent of the total subscriber base, witnessing the addition of 10.2 million during the month. RJio leads the wireless broadband market, with a market share of 56 percent, followed by Bharti and Vodafone-Idea at 21 percent each," ICRA said in its latest report.

ICRA also said that 100 percent of Reliance Jio's subscribers are broadband subscribers, while the same ratio for Vodafone-Idea stood at 27 percent and for Bharti at 32 percent.

The wireless subscriber base in India increased to 1,183.7 million in February 2019, adding 1.7 million subscribers over the previous month, the report said further.

Harsh Jagnani, Sector Head & Vice President- Corporate Ratings, ICRA, "The growth in subscriber base in February was primarily driven by RJio, which added 7.8 million subscribers. State-owned BSNL/MTNL was the only other telco gaining subscribers in the month, adding 0.9 million users. In terms of active subscribers as well, RJio was the biggest gainer, adding 9.3 million active subscribers in February, followed by BSNL/MTNL which added 1.1 million active subscribers."

" With this, RJio has now added 90 million active subscribers to its network in 11M FY2019, thereby taking its active subscriber base to 250 million and strengthening its position in the industry. The overall active subscriber base remained at 1,023 million in February, an increase in RJio's and BSNL/MTNL's active subscriber base has been at the expense of other industry participants, who lost 10.4 million active subscribers on a combined basis," Jagnani added.

With healthy addition to an active subscriber base, RJio's active subscriber market share has strengthened to 24.4 percent in February 2019 (23.5 percent in January 2019). Vodafone-Idea continues to lead the market with 36.9 percent market share (37.6 percent in January 2019), followed by Bharti at 32.1 percent (32.4 percent in January 2019).