Numbers released by the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India have shown that while many of the new operators have trouble maintaining their newly acquired customers, they have successfully eroded the shares of old operators.
The data showed that the new operators faced considerable difficulty in holding on to their new customers. According to the data, a large part of the new customers had not switched on their new connections during a period of 1-3 days at the end of December 2010.
The most ‘active’ customers were with Airtel, at 92%, followed by Idea at 90% and Vodafone with 76%.
Reliance CDMA had 68% and Reliance GSM had 66% switched on customers, while Tata DoCoMo, which was at one time leading the number of new subscribers added per month, had only 50% of its subscribers present on the network during the study period.
MTNL was at the bottom, with just 35% of switched on subscribers and was followed by Videocon (37%) and Uninor and STel, both with 45%.
According to the numbers, during the whole of 2010, Bharti Airtel lost 2 percentage points of their marketshare — dropping from 22.3% to 20.3%, followed by Reliance Communication, which fell 17.7% to 16.7%.
The third biggest loser of marketshare from January to December 2010 was Vodafone, which slipped from 17.3% of the total wireless market to 16.5% of the market.
The biggest gainer was Unitech-Telenor venture, Uninor, which increased its share of the market from 0.5% to 2.5% — a gain equivalent to Airtel’s loss. It was followed by Aircel, which went from 6.1% to 6.7% and Shyam Sistema — which owns the MTS brand — and increased its share from 2% to 2.9%.