New Delhi: Telecom giant Bharti Airtel has emerged as the leader among the mobile service providers in terms of gross revenue earned during the quarter ended March 31, 2007.
Also Hutch-Essar, in which UK’s Vodafone recently bought a controlling stake, has displaced BSNL from the third spot in terms of subscribers. Sunil Mittal-led Bharti Airtel earned Rs 5,958.82 crore, followed by Anil Ambani group company Reliance Communications at Rs 3,766.89 crore in the current financial year.
Hutch is at the third spot with revenues of Rs 3,052.97 crore, said the figures provided by service providers to Telecom Regulatory Authority of India.
Airtel is offering special subsidized rates for calls made by its mobile and fixed line customers to cyclone-hit Oman for a period of three days. The initiative is a humanitarian gesture by India’s leading telecom service provider to provide some succor to Indians who would be trying to get in touch with their near and dear ones in Oman.
Hutch-Essar, which would soon be renamed Vodafone-Essar following the British firm’s $10.9 billion takeover, has also emerged as the third largest mobile player in terms of subscribers and second largest in terms of GSM customers.
Hutch-Essar has 2.92 crore subscribers and a market share of 22.36 per cent in the GSM space as of May-end against 2.79 crore and 21.43 per cent respectively for BSNL.
Overall, Hutch-Essar is now the third largest cellular operator in the country after Bharti Airtel and RCom, which is mainly a CDMA player.
Airtel has a market share of 31.2 per cent with over 4.07 crore subscribers, while Reliance has 3.05 crore users. The GSM-based players together added 50 lakh users in May, taking the total to 13.06 crore subscribers in the world’s fastest-growing mobile market.
In terms of revenues, Tata Teleservices earned Rs 1,766.65 crore, while the other Tata group company VSNL, which has NLD, ILD and ISP operations, posted revenues of Rs 1,012.22 crore. Birla group company, Idea, recorded revenues of Rs 1,374.29 crore for the January-March quarter.
According to industry figures, in terms of average revenue per user (ARPU), a key indicator for operators’ revenue rise per subscriber, Bharti again topped the list, which was once dominated by Hutch-Essar.
With inputs from PTI
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