Jio’s subscriber addition gains spell pain for Vodafone Idea

The March quarter results of Reliance Industries Ltd (RIL) had one bright spot—a pickup in Jio’s net subscriber additions. They rose sharply to 15.2 million in the quarter. Note that this is the best performance in the previous four quarters.

Of course, net subscriber adds are still much lower than the average of around 25 million before the December 2019 tariff hikes.

Even so, the net additions were far higher than the 5.2 million, 7.3 million and 10.8 million net additions in the December, September and June quarters, respectively.

While JioPhones were relaunched with a big splash and helped drive growth, “this also reflects that farmer protests are not having as much of an impact as they did in December and January”, said analysts at Jefferies India Pvt. Ltd.