Airtel, Vodafone, Idea gain from RCOM’s 4G migration, says ICRA

India’s top three telcos- Bharti Airtel, Vodafone India and Idea Cellular – gained as many as 1.2 million mobile subscribers from the users migrating from Reliance Communications’ CDMA network, credit rating agency ICRA said Wednesday.

Starting May this year, Anil Ambani-owned RCom gradually shut its CDMA network across circles and asked the nearly 5 million users to shift to its 4G network in a phased manner, following the liberalisation of spectrum in the 800 MHz band and subsequent sharing with Reliance Jio Infocomm.

The top three telcos strengthened their position further with combined market share of 60.8% as against 58.9% from a year ago, with a majority of the gain coming at the expense of RCom, ICRA said.

Sunil Mittal-driven Bharti Airtel consolidated its market leadership position with 23 basis point improvement in market share to 24.6% as of May 2016, followed by the Indian unit of UK-based Vodafone at 19.1% and Aditya Birla group’s Idea Cellular at 17.0%. The ratings agency said that India’s mobile subscriber base in May 2016 declined for the first time since September 2013, due mainly to the disconnection of CDMA subscribers by RCom and discontinuation of mobile services by Videocon Telecom. Videocon lost 5.2 million subscribers and RCom lost 1.2 million subscribers in May 2016.

In that month, the wireless subscriber base declined to 1033.16 million from 1034.25 million in April 2016, a first since September 2013, ICRA said, adding that the active mobile subscriber base declined by 1.56 million in May 2016 to 932.5 million.

The broadband subscriber growth however has continued to report healthy growth, reaching 159.76 million by May 2016. Given that wireless broadband subscribers constitute just 14% of the total wireless subscriber base, the firm expects that the wireless broadband subscribers will continue to show growth in the medium term.