Bharti Airtel lost most market share in 2010

Bharti Airtel suffered the biggest market share decline during 2010 owing to the entry of new operators, followed by Reliance and Vodafone, according to full year subscriber numbers released by the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (Trai).

The biggest winner in the market share game was Uninor, which gained nearly 2%, followed by Videocon, which increased its market share by around 1%.

The data, however, also showed that a large portion of subscribers, of the new operators, had bought their connections ‘to try out’ and did not use it regularly.

From January 2010 to December 2010, the four incumbent GSM operators - Airtel, Vodafone, Idea and BSNL - saw their combined mobile market share decline around 3.4% percentage points, from 62.6% at the end of January to 59.2% at the end of December 2010.

The decline would be steeper for the standalone GSM market, but the numbers have not been released by the regulator.

Uninor, the biggest gainer, increased its market share from around 0.5% of the total wireless market to 2.5% of the market, followed by Videocon, which went from zero to 1% during the same period.

None of the traditional GSM operators were able to increase their market share, with Bharti Airtel leading the losses with a 2.1% percentage point loss to end the year at 20.3%.

It was followed by Reliance, which lost 1% and Vodafone, which lost 0.75%. Losses for Idea Cellular were the least, at around 0.1%, while BSNL too managed to limit its losses to 0.4%.

Tata was the only big operator that did not see a decline in its subscriber market share, primarily due to its blazing subscriber acquisition rates after launching its Tata DoCoMo GSM service.

The firm, which introduced its GSM service during last year, increased its market share marginally from 11.1% to 11.2% even as its CDMA peer Reliance lost market share.

Aircel also, put up a good show, increasing its total market share from 6.1% to 6.7%, while MTS went from 2% to 2.9%.

The market share gains of new operators, however, look far less flattering when read with their subscriber dormancy rates - the portion of subscribers who have not ‘switched on’ even once during the last 1-3 days.

New operators tend to have a high dormancy rates, as many subscribers taking SIM cards are enticed by low call rates, but soon stop using them due to poor signal coverage, making the connection dormant.

MTNL led the dormancy figures, with only 35% of its subscriber base switching on at least once during the 72-hour window under check, followed by Videocon with 37% and Uninor and STel with just 45% ‘live’ subscribers.

They were followed by Tata CDMA, with 47% ‘switched on’ subscribers and TATA GSM and MTS with 50% each.

Notably, Aircel Cellular - a new operator - managed to notch up 60% ‘switched on’ subscribers, higher than even traditional operator BSNL, which had just 57% of its customers turn on during the period under study.

Unsurprisingly, the highest proportion of switched on subscribers were found on Airtel’s network, with 92%, followed closely by Idea, with 90%.