Jio becomes India’s largest telco within three years of launch

NEWDELHI: Reliance Jio is now the number one telecom operator in India by both subscriber- base as well as revenue market share, achieving the feat after a little over three years of operations.

The Mukesh Ambani-led company added 5.6 million mobile subscribers in November, taking its total to 369.93 million, and replacing Vodafone Idea as the country’s largest mobile services provider by subscribers, data released by the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (Trai) on Thursday showed.

With this, Jio holds a 32.04% share of subscribers in the over 1.15-billion-user Indian mobile services market. It had a 30.79% market share at the end of October.

Unlike its rivals, Jio’s userbase is entirely made up of 4G subscribers.

To be sure, the company had already become the number one in terms of revenue market share last year when it grabbed 31.7% share of the adjusted gross revenue (AGR) that the industry recorded in the April-june period.

The RIL subsidiary entered the telecom sector in September 2016 with cheap data plans and handsets, which led to an unprecedented rise in mobile data consumption in the country, with an average user consuming 11 GB data per month.

In the subsequent disruption, half-a-dozen companies either shut shop or were acquired by bigger players. Reliance Communications and Aircel filed for bankruptcy, while Airtel acquired Telenor India and Tata’s consumer mobility business.