India’s GSM operators (excluding RCOM and TTSL) reported another month of strong SIM card sales adding 11.1 mn SCIU versus 10.32 mn in the previous month. Increasing multi-SIM usage makes any inference on underlying industry trends based on this monthly data (mostly) meaningless.
Bharti Airtel – Bharti reported an increase in net adds in Nov 2009 to 2.8 mn, from 2.7 mn in Oct 2009. The company’s net adds market share, however, continues to dip – now down to 25.3% (among the GSM players excluding RCOM and TTSL) from 34% as late as May 2009. Bharti Airtel has bid for Warid Telecom in Bangladesh.
Vodafone – Net adds decline to 2.8 mn from 3 mn reported in the previous month.
Idea – Reported a sharp increase in net adds to 2.55 mn, up from 1.9 mn reported in Oct 2009. Idea’s tariffs are now lower than both Bharti and Vodafone
Lastly, BSNL’s net adds continue to remain volatile—it reported net adds of 1.2 mn, up from 0.6 mn in the previous month. Aircel’s net adds were down to 1.6 mn, from 2 mn in Oct 2009, while MTNL and BPL reported steady net adds of 73,000 and 50,000 respectively.
What matters is the underlying traffic growth, distribution of the same and pricing trends – we see near-term pressure on incumbents on all these fronts.