Is Reliance Jio already the second largest telecom firm in India?

Mukesh Ambani-led Reliance Jio Infocomm has taken the highest share than the Kumar Birla-led Idea cellular and Vodafone both of whom had a head start of about two decades over Reliance Jio, had an AGR market share of 21% and 16.6%, while Jio has a market share of as much as 25.6%.

According to the Trai’s financial report for the March, quarter puts Reliance Jio Infocomm Ltd’s adjusted gross revenue (AGR) at Rs 6,218 crore. This is about 22% higher than Vodafone India Ltd’s revenue and only 12% lower than market leader Bharti Airtel Ltd’s AGR of Rs 7,087 crore.

As far as Graph is concerned, the AGR figure needs to be adjusted some more to reflect true market share. The Telcos AGR report doesn’t fully capture revenues subscribers pay for roaming and national long distance (NLD) calls. So, AGR reported by Telcos need to include NLD revenues to the extent as these are used by their captive subscribers.

Based on estimates of Kotak Institutional Equities, after making these adjustments, Reliance Jio’s market share stands at 20.7%. There is another adjustment to reflect revenues of Aircel Ltd, which filed for bankruptcy earlier this year and didn’t bother reporting revenues to Trai.

Based on this AGR data, Reliance Jio has a market share of 20.4%, which is not much lower than Vodafone’s 21.5%. So while the new entrant may not be No.2 yet, it isn’t far away from the mark.

The company may well reach that milestone in the June quarter, although it may get relegated back to the third position after Vodafone and Idea announce their merger.

Jio, which started operations in September 2016 with a nationwide 4G network, reported an over 18% sequential jump in adjusted gross revenue (including national long distance revenue) to Rs 6,300 crore the quarter ended March, while Airtel, Vodafone India, and Idea suffered sequential falls of 5.5%, 4.8% and 8.8% on this score to Rs 10,100 crore, Rs 6,700 crore, and Rs 5,200 crore, respectively, ICICI Securities said in a note analysing the data collated by Trai, added an ET report quoting ICICI Securities.

As on March 2018, Jio claims to have around 186.6 million subscribers. To achieve 99 percent population coverage, Jio services are further extended in the existing areas within the fiscal year period of 2018-2019.