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Andrew Bonwick
Vice President of Product Development at Relm Insurance
Madhav Sheth
CEO of Ai+ Smartphone
Stephen Rose
CEO Render Networks
There are two telecom operators in the industry right now that are doing significantly worse than the incumbent telecom operators, and even before we have said it, you can guess that we are talking about the private telecom operator Vodafone Idea and the public telecom company Bharat Sanchar Nigam Limited (BSNL). You might ask why I say that with conviction, but it’s not just me, but the TRAI data sings the same tune. In February of 2021, things seemed to be going well for Vodafone Idea, as the company broke the two-year streak of not adding a single subscriber and continuously losing one. This was taken as a signal that the telco might finally be turning around its luck and financials. But, the latest TRAI data for the month of April has painted an entirely different picture.
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Vodafone Idea Brutal Subscriber Churn After a Good Month
Things started going wrong for Vodafone Idea post the network integration exercise, as the network troubles for the subscribers were enough to give them a nudge towards the other competing telcos. As a result, the subscribers did not wait to port their SIMs to Reliance Jio and Bharti Airtel. As for the new subscribers’ addition, the JioPhone phenomenon dragged on the further subscriber addition in Jio’s side aided with the cheap plans and additional Freedom plans offering extra data. This resulted in the brunt for Vodafone Idea, which continued its churn of subscribers and still persists on the same path.
As per the TRAI report based on April month, Vodafone Idea has lost 1.8 million subscribers, whereas Reliance Jio added 4.7 million more subscribers. Close to Vodafone Idea, BSNL also lost 1.3 million subscribers, whereas Bharti Airtel stood in a comparatively neutral position while adding a mere 0.5 million subscribers. Although the position of BSNL is pretty understandable that subscribers would likely migrate to other telcos for a better network and the lack of a 4G network is the single biggest reason for the churn, the story of Vodafone Idea is a little more tricky than that.
