India’s mobile phone market continued its blistering pace of growth to register the second highest ever monthly addition of 9.22 million new mobile subscribers, to reach a total of 296.08 million wireless users as of the end of July 2008.
In comparison, China‘s mobile subscribers grew by 7.6 million to total 608.4 mil users while Russia added almost 3 million users to reach 175.75 mil as of end July.
India’s new wireless subscribers peaked at 10.16 million earlier in March this year, according to figures provided by the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI). The country’s wireless market is growing at such a frentic pace and the greatest beneficiaries are the handset makers and mobile service providers.
Market leader Bharti Airtel celebrated signing on its 75th million customer to become the world’s 4th-largest in-country mobile operator, behind China Mobile, China Unicom and America’s AT&T. Airtel had crossed the 60 mil customer mark in February 2008 and the 50 mil mark in October last year, thereby becoming one of the fastest growing telecom companies in the world.
Airtel has also overtaken state-run BSNL as India’s largest telecom firm by total subscribers, including fixed-line subscribers, and its mobile base totaled 72.07 million with 2.7 million new additions as of July 2008.
Vodafone Essar added 1.7 million new subscribers while Reliance Communication had 1.5 million new CDMA subscribers. Overall GSM operators own 218.9 million subscribers while CDMA players have nearly 77 million users in India.
India’s Top Mobile Operators By Wireless Subscriber Base
India’s broadband takeup is still slow with only 4.57 million broadband subscribers in July 2008, although this figure has almost doubled from 2.47 million in July last year.
More details on breakdown by mobile operator is available here
