India's newest mobile operator Reliance Jio Infocomm continues to make strong gains in the mobile market due to its aggressive pricing strategy, adding 8.3 million customers in January alone, according to the latest statistics from telecoms regulator Trai.
Jio's market share has meanwhile increased to 14.62%, up from 11.72% in September, the statistics show. The operator had 168.4 million customers by the end of January.
Incumbent operator Bharti Airtel maintained its first place in terms of market share, adding 1.5 million customers to take its total to 291.6 million. Second place Vodafone India added 1.28 million customers to take its total to 213.8 million, while third placed Idea's total customer base grew by 1.14 million to 197.64 million. Airtel, Vodafone and Idea had market shares of 25.32%, 18.56% and 17.16% respectively by January 31.
Reliance Communications continued to bleed subscribers, with its customer base falling by 21.1 million in January following its decision to exit the mobile market by selling its wireless assets to Reliance Jio for nearly 240 billion rupees ($3.69 billion).
This meant that the market saw a net loss of 15.5 million subscribers for the month. Wireless teledensity meanwhile fell from 90.11 to 88.83 over the course of the month.
The statistics also show that 6.18 million mobile number portability requests were received during the month. Since the introduction of nationwide mobile number portability in 2011 there have been 344.6 million cumulative requests.