Mukesh Ambani-led Reliance Jio has added more mobile phone customers than Bharti Airtel in February 2021, bucking a trend of losing to the Sunil Bharti Mittal-led telco for six straight months. Jio gained 4.26 million wireless subscribers compared with Airtel’s 3.73 million in February, data released by Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (Trai) on Tuesday shows. In the month of January, Jio had added 1.9 million users while Airtel had added 5.8 million users.
After February’s addition, Jio’s mobile user base rose to 414.9 million while for Airtel it stood at 348.3 million. Experts say the strong market momentum in February is because of the positive business sentiments prevailing in February, weeks before the second wave of the COVID-19 pandemic gripped the entire nation.Visitor location register, a key metric reflecting the number of active subscribers on a mobile network, showed up at 97.47% for Bharti Airtel, 90.61% for Vi and 78.16% for Jio.
The market share of Reliance Jio in terms of total wireless subscribers stood at 35.54%, Bharti Airtel at 29.83% and Vodafone Idea at 24.20%, as per TRAI.
