The year 2007 was another remarkable year for Bharti Airtel. The company retained its Numero Uno slot in the Indian Wireless market. At the end of Dec-2007, the company had 55.16 mn subscribers up by 72.5% YoY. Vodafone Essar India ended the year with 39.86 mn subscribers. BSNL which gained spectrum by virtue of being a government company and facing criticism from private operators, managed to grow at a slower pace and ended the year with 32.71 mn subscribers. Idea Cellular had an impressive performance and ended the year with 21.05 mn subscribers. Aircel was the fastest growing cellular operator with subscriber base doubling in 2007 to 9.43 mn. [As usual CDMA operators are late and haven’t reported their numbers yet]
Bharti Airtel now holds the highest share in the GSM segment. However, with the entry of RCom’s GSM service the equation may not remain the same in late 2008 and 2009. [Currently, we discount the entry of Real Estate developers like Unitech, Parsvnath etc who don’t understand the capital intensive business of Telecom]
As I have already said in my previous post, the unofficial lobby of GSM operators will continue to reduce rates and offer incentives and make the entry for new operators so tough, that these new operators will only see RED on their balance sheet and be forced to rethink about Telecom ventures 🙂 [I also know that some of them are being backed by Global Telcos, but still think its an uphill task]