India: Mobile subscriber adds at 7.62m for November!
By Ben Robinson on Saturday, January 3rd, 2009 at 4:38 AM PST In Carriers
Telecom Tiger is reporting that Indian Mobile operators added a total of 7.62m subs in November 08! Wow! Interestingly also, this was a slight dip in the rate compared to October.
There a good number of Operators in India, so this isn’t just adds to a single (or couple of) Operator(s). Some of the big hitters though were Bharti Airtel with 2.72m, and Vodafone (NYSE: VOD) Essar with 2.06m.
India really is a growth economy in terms of unit gains, but ARPU is typically much lower per user – so the question then becomes, can you actually make money from each sub? If they cost you in admin charges to add, then suddenly the numbers can become a burden if subs are not spending any/much money.
We’ll look on in to 2009 to see what each of the Operators in India comes back with in terms of net profit, to see whether these incredible growth rates are translating in to cash….
[Story Via: Telecom Tiger / Image Via: Wikipedia]
Ben, a small correction there – India added 7.62 million GSM Mobile subscribers. We have a few CDMA operators as well…All in all, India added 10.35 million mobile subs in November 2008, marginally lower than 10.42 in October.
I’ve covered the mobile and broadband stats in detail at http://www.medianama.com/2009/01/223-oct-2008-india-mobile-subscribers-broadband-wireless/
What’s interesting is that monthly subscriber addition has been on the rise – was around 8M/month last year, moved up to around 9M per month, and it has been 10M for the last few months now.
No stopping the mobile juggernaut in India.