Bharat Sanchar Nigam Limited (BSNL), a state-run telecom operator in India, has not performed well financially over the last decade or 10 years. However, its overall subscriber base has only gone up. BSNL has added about 9 million mobile subscribers since 2014. At the end of March 31, 2014, BSNL had 9,46,49,445 (94.6 million) mobile subscribers. This number went up to 10,36,83,498 (103.6 million) mobile subscribers at the end of March 31, 2023. With the arrival of 4G and 5G shortly, the state-run telecom company will likely add more subscribers.
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It is 2022-23 which was a very tough period for BSNL. At the end of March 31, 2022, BSNL's overall subscriber base was 113 million. But a year later, as mentioned above, the subscriber base fell to 103.6 million (a loss of about 10 million users in a year). 2022 is the year when the private telcos launched 5G and expanded 4G aggressively. This might have led to BSNL losing subscribers to Airtel and Jio. Even Vi's 4G would be a better proposition for BSNL customers who are stuck with legacy network services.
However, active subscribers are a more important metric to measure a company's performance rather than comparing their overall subscriber base. At the end of March 31, 2014, BSNL had about 60 million active users. Cut to March 31, 2023, BSNL's active user number was 53.66 million. So active users have gone down over the last decade. This is largely to do with the absence of high-speed networks. Still, most of BSNL's customers are 2G/3G users.
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Due to this, more users are preferring private telecom operators. However, BSNL has plans to launch 4G and 5G shortly throughout India. The reduction in total active subscribers has hurt BSNL's overall revenues. Its ARPU (average revenue per user) will also be affected negatively and will hurt the bottom-line revenues
