Bharti Airtel, India's second-largest telecom operator, is closing the gap between Jio and itself in revenue market share (RMS). Telcos look at RMS as key figure to understand how much value are they able to capture from the market. Jio's RMS has been steady at 42% QoQ. However, Bharti Airtel has seen an improvement of 100 basis points or 1% QoQ and around 2.2% YoY in Q3 FY25. One reason Airtel's RMS is growing is because of tariff hikes and being able to capture high-paying customers. Jio is playing the slightly affordable game, due to which while it has a much larger subscriber base, its RMS is only 2% more than Airtel.
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In one year, Airtel has halved the RMS gap betwen Jio and itself. Bharti Airtel's approach to reach more rural pockets of India and push users to recharge with higher data bundled plans is working well.
"Airtel gained revenue share in 21/22 circles in 3Q, losing some only in UP-East, while Jio gained revenue share in 8/22 circles, while Vi lost market share in all 22 circles," said Jefferies in a recent note.
Bharti Airtel has essentially been growing at the cost of Vodafone Idea (Vi). While Airtel's RMS grew, and Jio's remained steady, Vi's RMS tanked to an all time low in all 22 telecom circles. This is due to the telco losing customers continously. These customers are likely porting out to Airtel as they get similar tariffs wih the Sunil Mittal led telco.
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Tariff Hikes Helped in Boosting Industry Revenue
Jefferies said, "During Q3FY25, annualised sectoral revenues continued to scale up to a new peak of $32 billion along with telecom sector revenue growth accelerating 14% on-year from $28 billion a year ago, aided by the residual flow-through of industry-wide headline rate hikes undertaken last July."
