Published 17:28 IST, February 26th 2020

Reliance Jio and major telecom operators face user exodus, stocks slide

Reliance Jio, Vodafone and Airtel see a massive decline in their subscriber base since hiking their tariff plans in December last year. Learn the details.

Republic Business
2 min read

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Reliance Jio Infocomm recorded a sharp fall in mobile phone user additions in December 2019. The company, headed by Mukesh Ambani, was able to add 82,308 mobile users in December, thereby taking its user base over 37 crores last year. This was comparatively much lower to the numbers from October and November which saw a decent hike in subscriber additions at 91 lakh and 56 lakh respectively. The company’s shares have also suffered as they were down 1.04% at ₹1401.50.

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Vodafone Idea, which has been battling a Rs 57,000-crore AGR shock, lost a staggering 3.6 million users in December, whereas Bharti Airtel lost out over 11,000 users by the end of the month. The customer base for Vodafone Idea and Airtel fell down to 33.26 crores and 32.72 crores respectively, as per the latest subscriber data collated by TRAI.

This was after the implementation of tariff hikes by the three major telecom service providers during December, according to the latest subscriber data from TRAI. Shares of Bharti Airtel come down to 2.42% at ₹522.40, whereas, for Vodafone Idea, it was down 1.01% at Rs 3.91. There are reports which claim that Vodafone Idea currently owes ₹50,000 crore in the AGR case, whereas Bharti Airtel is obliged to pay ₹35,586 crores to the government.

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In December 2019, Reliance Jio, Airtel, and Vodafone Idea had hiked their bundled prepaid tariffs for the first time in over 3 years by around 14-33%. And while Jio and Airtel were able to marginally increase their respective customer market share to 32.14% and 28.43% respectively from November that year, Vodafone Idea’s customer market share went down to 28.89%, as indicated by TRAI.

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