A year after the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (Trai) started segregating active and inactive users, it?s the same old story. Incumbent operators like Bharti Airtel, Vodafone and Idea have eight active users out of 10, while not even half the user base is active at new operators who won licences and spectrum from A Raja in 2008. The only exception is Uninor, in which the share of active subscribers climbed from 30.91% to 61% in one year.
Analysts see little hope for new operators like Etisalat DB (Swan), Videocon, Loop Telecom and STel to improve their active share since during the last eight months subscriber additions have slowed across the industry. Telcos, which were adding 17 million subscribers every month around the same time last year, have seen numbers fall sharply since April. The latest monthly addition was around 8 million.
India currently has 873.61 million mobile users, out of which 70% or 617.76 million are active, almost the same percentage as last year. This means the number of subscribers who actively use their mobile phones continues to be remain much lower than the overall number.
New operators like Videocon (previously Datacom), Etisalat and Loop have a combined user base of only 11 million. Videocon has 6.2 million users, of which 39.37% are active. In the case of Etisalat DB, 29.38% of 1.5 million users are active. At Loop, the total base is 3.19 million, of which 42% are active.
The only one to have shown improvement is Uninor. It had 11.26 million subscribers last September, of whom 30.91% were active. Its total base has grown to 29.65 million, of which 61% is active.
Even CDMA operators like Reliance Communications and Tata Teleservices that entered GSM territory haven?t shown much growth in terms of active users. According to the latest Trai figures, RCom?s active subscribers stand at 63.48% of its overall user base of 147 million. For TTSL, the number stands at 50.27% of its total user base of 88.7 million.
Commenting on the low share of active subscribers by the new operators, Prashant Singhal of Ernst & Young commented: ?I wouldn’t really count them as operators?.
On the slower addition of overall number of mobile connections, Singhal said: ?Until a year ago, the focus was simply on subscriber additions but now, the sector is responding fast to mobile number portability and an impending telecom policy?.
Among incumbents, Idea Cellular continues to lead the charts with 91.03% of active users. Bharti Airtel comes second with 88.60% active users. Vodafone is third with 81.22% active users. These operators have more or less maintained or improved their position vis-a-vis last year.
