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Another Extraordinary Quarter As India Goes on to Take Second Place in the Global Market
IndiaÃ's mobile market added an extra 26.9m connections in the first three months of 2008, to take the total number of mobile subscribers to 256.6m. At the end of the quarter, penetration stood at 22.9%, up from 20.5% at the year end and 14.2% one year earlier. The last quarter was the second best on record, behind Q2 07, which saw 28.6m new connections.
However, a material part of that growth was attributable to the reclassification of certain CDMA subscribers, which had previously been in the fixed-wireless category. Without that, this would have been the best quarter on record by more than 2.5m.
The Indian government has recently issued a large number of new licences and it is perhaps no surprise that the major operators are all attempting to build up their bases ahead of their launches. Every operator saw an increase in subscriber numbers over the quarter and even the seventh largest company in the market managed to add more than a million new connections.
Changes in quarterly market share are not, perhaps, that significant, unless they are part of a longer term trend. The most notable long terms trends here are that Bharti is back up to the same level of market share it enjoyed five years ago, with just over 24%, while BSNL, at 14.19%, is also back to where it was five years ago, just after its launch. In the interim, it had come very close to 20% so this is quite a retreat. Vodafone, for its part, seems to have paused for breath in this last quarter after several quarters of gains. It is vying for second position in the market with Reliance, which has the disadvantage of operating two separate technologies, GSM and CDMA.
On the basis of these end of March numbers, India was the third largest market in the world, behind China and the USA. By mid April it had overtaken the US to become the second largest market, a position it is likely to keep until such time as it overtakes China and becomes the largest. As China is currently growing at least as fast as India in absolute terms and has a lead of some 300m, this isnÃ't likely to occur any time soon, but IndiaÃ's faster population growth rate suggests that ultimately, it will.
Posted to the site on 9th July 2008
This article was extracted from The Mobile World Briefing, the weekly newsletter from The Mobile World.
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