Leading GSM mobile operators Bharti Airtel and Vodafone Essar saw subscriber additions slow in September amid intense price competition as new entrants seek a foothold in the fast-growing market.
Bharti Airtel, India's top mobile operator, added 2.51 million mobile users in September, its slowest pace of additions since May 2008 and compared with 2.81 million users added in August, data from the Cellular Operators' Association of India(COAI) showed on Monday.
Vodafone Essar, majority owned by Vodafone, signed up 1.97 million users in September, its slowest in a year and compared with 2.19 million added in August.
Bharti has signed up an average of 2.76 million users per month in the first nine months of 2009 to have a total of 110.5 million and Vodafone Essar's average monthly adds for the period is 2.43 million, with a total 82.8 million mobile users.
Total mobile additions for operators using GSM technology fell to 8.59 million in September from 9.31 million in August.
The data does not include GSM subscribers of Reliance Communications Ltd and Tata Teleservices, who report figures separately. The majority of customers of the two companies use the rival CDMA platform.
Reliance Communications, which had 84.1 million subscribers at end-August, is India's second-ranked mobile operator. The company expanded its GSM mobile services across the country this year.
No.6 operator Tata Teleservices, in which Japan's NTT DoCoMo owns a 26 percent stake, also recently launched GSM services in some parts of the country. The introduction of a per-second billing plan helped it add a company record of 3.4 million users in August.
Monday, October 12, 2009
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment