Industry porting dip by 24% month-on-month to 4.1 million in Oct’19

Subscriber porting has reduced in the month of October, indicating that customers will be more unwilling to shift to competition, now that all tariffs are almost at the same level.

“Industry porting dip by 24% month-on-month to 4.1 million in October’19 compared to 5.4 million in the past month. Mobile number portability (MNP) churn rate dips to 0.3%,” said ICICI Securities.

The telecom sector regulator’s data for October 2019, shows that Bharti Airtel and Vodafone Idea (VIL) stalled their customer drops, adding 0.1 million and 0.2 million in October, While the uptick was a first for VIL since merger, for Airtel it was a rise since January 2019.

Rival Reliance Jio on the other hand added 9.1 million customers in the same period. But this was below expectations. “RJIO’s subscriber addition jumped to 9.1 million (up from 7 million in September) driven by its lucrative offering of Jiophone at throw-away prices. This addition was, however, lower than our expectation, which we attribute to the overall consumption slowdown, particularly in rural markets,” said Edelweiss in its report.

The three private players may now find it tougher to improve their subscriber growth because of the recent tariff raise where all three are almost at par with each other post the latest hikes.

However, according to source VIL’s November numbers show that its consumer base dropped by around 36.3 million to 336.3 million. This however is not the data of the sector regulator. The company numbers are different from the regulator’s numbers also because the former report only the active subscribers.

According to reports, the firm has reduced time period of recording active subscriber from 120 days to 90 days, which is why the difference. Had it been the same period, the decreased numbers would have reflected in end of December.