Bharti Airtel’s healthy subscriber additions in January 2025 comes amid muted industry performance at 0.6 million subscribers as compared to the 2 million subscribers reported in the previous month by the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI).
The industry has had a cumulative subscriber loss of 21.9 million in the five consecutive months prior, due to SIM consolidation in the lower-ARPU segment following the telcos’ tariff hikes.
Airtel reported an overall subscriber addition of 1.7 million, followed by 0.7 million subscriber additions by Reliance Jio. According to JM Financial, while Jio’s net subscriber gain was slightly weak, it still continued with the subscriber gain momentum as witnessed for 28 consecutive months over March 2022-June 2024. Jio had earlier also reported net subs loss due to SIM consolidation post the November 2021 tariff hike and repurposing of customer retention efforts for low-ARPU subscribers.
Meanwhile, Vodafone Idea (Vi) and BSNL lost 1.3 million and 0.4 million subscribers respectively.
Vi’s management earlier said it is hopeful that the ongoing network expansion capex will help turn around the subscriber loss by end of FY25 though it expressed difficulty in predicting a timeline for the same, said JM Financial.
UBS firm in its report said, “Overall, since the tariff hike in July, Airtel has lost 2.1 million subscribers cumulatively, whereas Jio and Idea have lost 10.7 million and 11.4 million subscribers respectively. Given this gap in performance, we believe the next tariff hike could take longer versus consensus expectations of another price hike in FY26. We also remain concerned at the market’s ability to absorb another meaningful tariff hike in FY26. We have a Neutral rating on Bharti, Buy on VIL and Buy on Reliance Industries.”