India - GSM Daily Adds Almost 180k in February As CDMA Falters

CDMA net additions in India dropped to their lowest level for nine months in February 2007, as Reliance Infocomm took its foot off the gas after four successive months of net additions over 1m. In total a net 1.14m new CDMA customers were added to the national customer base in India in February, which equates to just 23% of the GSM total of 4.88m for the month. Given that February has only 28 days, however, the totals are not strictly comparable with other months of the year.

A simple calculation shows that an average of 174k GSM customers were added per day during the month of February 2007 - an all time record - whilst the 41k CDMA customers added per day in February still represents the worst rate since May 2006.

In total, Indian mobile customers numbered over 155m at the end of February 2006, up 4% on the January figure and 82.8% on the February figure last year. Bharti Airtel continued to extend its lead over the rest of the field with 22.8% of this total as at 28th February, whilst Maxis Malaysia's Aircel also made headway.

Losing market share were Reliance, where a 0.2pp decline at its CDMA business gave rise to a 0.1pp decline overall, as well as fellow CDMA player TATA Teleservices and new Vodafone acquistion Hutch, which slipped to a market share of 16.3% at the end of February 2007 from 17.1% a year earlier.

This article was extracted from The Mobile World Briefing, the weekly newsletter from The Mobile World. To download a sample issue of the Briefing in PDF format, please click here. For more information including full subscription pricing, please visit The Mobile World"

Posted to the site on 22nd March 2007