Airtel’s Decision to Not Bring a JioPhone Competitor is Hurting its Subscriber Addition

Bharti Airtel which used to be the leading telecom operator in terms of subscriber base already lost its place to the merged entity of Vodafone India and Idea Cellular. It’s currently second on the list, but in the next four to six months, it might sacrifice the place to Reliace Jio which is adding subscribers on a big number every month. Jio already has over 250 million subscribers as of September 2018 and the number must’ve grown bigger in October and mid-November. A significant number of Jio subscribers are coming from the aggressive JioPhone pricing. But Airtel did not bring any such feature phone and already revealed its intentions of not going after JioPhone. But this move from Airtel is hurting its chances of racking up more subscribers. But it’s betting big on other aspects and wants its 2G feature phone users to upgrade to a smartphone and enjoy 4G subscribers.

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Airtel Hurting Its Own Chances: Analysts

Naveen Kulkarni, head of research at Reliance Securities, said in his statement to ET, “Airtel is unable to deal with JioPhone’s pricing challenge as it does not have similar subsidised 4G VoLTE feature phones on offer, and it’s unlikely to engage in any aggressive customer acquisition strategy involving doling out of handset subsidies before having a comparable 4G network like Jio’s.”

If we were to go by the words of analysts, then it is an uphill climb for the Sunil Bharti Mittal led telco since Airtel is yet to establish a 4G network in the country which compares in scale to Reliance Jio’s. It is no doubt that Reliance Jio currently handles a disproportionate amount of 4G consumers in the country. On top of that, the telco is also troubled by other problems like revenue pressure and profitability. In the last quarter ending September, Reliance Jio’s new Monsoon Hungama Offer wherein users could exchange their feature phones and buy a new JioPhone attracted a lot of traction from the masses. As a result, Reliance Jio added 37 million customers to its subscriber base, whereas Airtel lost 6.6 million subscribers.