Reliance Jio will start facing the heat in coming days as its subscriber addition has slowed down in the month of March 2017, according to a report from UBS. The Mukesh Ambani-led newcomer has added just 5.8 million new customers in March 2017, which is more than 50 percent down from 12.2 million subscribers added in February 2017.
The Telecom Regulator Authority of India (TRAI) recently said that Jio's market share has increased to 9.3 percent by the end of March 2017 from 8.8 percent in February. However, Reliance Jio did not disclose the subscriber addition for the month of April, which will reveal the entire story of the operator.
"We are surprised to see the lack of acceleration in March since Jio "Prime" offer was announced in the month. April was the first month of Jio's paid services and would offer further insight into customer conversion and migration from incumbents to Jio,' cites the UBS Analysis report.
For the uninitiated, Reliance Jio introduced the JioPrime membership plan back in February and later on claimed that a whopping 72 million subscribers have registered for the membership scheme. Later on, the network introduced Summer Surprise offer to sweeten the deal, but it was discontinued due to the violation of terms and conditions of TRAI's norms.
Later on, the new entrant introduced Dhan Dhana Dhan offer under which it is offering 1GB data per day for 84 days at just Rs. 309 (existing JioPrime members) and Rs. 408 for the new users.
The Chairman of the company, Mukesh Ambani also termed Reliance Jio as the network 'highest migration from free to paid services.' It will be interesting to see how many new customers have Jio added in April 2017.
This news is not a surprising one as many reports claimed that the Jio subscriber addition would slow down once after it starts charging customers. And the same is happening now. Nevertheless, Jio is still ahead of incumbent operators in the monthly subscriber addition list.
