Reliance Jio is now the country’s largest telecom operator with 397 million revenue-generating customers as of June 2020. But VLR data suggests that there are around 87 million paying customers who are not using the mobile network.
Before I go into further detail, you should know that VLR or ‘visitor location register’ is the metic that denotes the actual number of users actively using a mobile number.
Kotak Institutional Equities has analyzed the June subscriber data put out by the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (Trai) and found that there are around 87 million subscribers who are recharging their number but didn’t connect to Jio’s network.
Now if we just consider the ‘VLR; mobile user base, Jio, and Bharti Airtel have almost a similar number of users. Even Airtel has a lead with 311 million ‘VLR’ mobile user base as compared to 310 million ‘VLR’ mobile user base of Jio.
“VLR is a purely technical measure but is a fairly decent proxy of consumer activity on a network,” Kotak International Equities said in its note. “We are unable to comprehend why R-Jio’s subscriber base would exhibit much different behavior than Bharti’s subscriber base.”
If we recall the numbers revealed by Jio and Airtel in their recent investor disclosures, Jio claimed 397 million paying customers while Airtel just confirmed 280 million. How can there be a big difference in active vs Paying customers? In the case of Airtel, it has 10% higher active users than its paying consumer base.
In the month of June, Airtel added 3.7 million active mobile users while Jio just managed to add 2.1 million active subscribers. This shows that Airtel is now giving a tough competition to Jio.
Source: ET
