Bharti Airtel is miles ahead of Reliance Jio when it comes to the postpaid market. It is fair to say that Reliance Jio is quite new to the segment, but its offerings aren’t much different from Airtel’s and were expected to uproot the existing postpaid user base of the telco. However, postpaid customers are generally considered more loyal to their operators, and it has been proved once again. Airtel added a record number of postpaid users in the previous two-quarters leaving Reliance Jio far behind. This is a good sign for Airtel since its goal of acquiring ‘premium’ users is going strong — more details on the story ahead.
Reliance Jio Postpaid Plans Made Negligible Impact on the Market
According to a report from ET Telecom, Airtel added 7,00,000 users in the December quarter of 2020. In the last six months, the telco added a total of 14,00,000 users which is also near a decade high meaning Reliance Jio’s postpaid offerings had a negligible impact on the market. Reliance Jio launched its postpaid plans in September 2020, so it has been around six months only. But the plans introduced by Jio were on the cheaper side with more data and benefits. Yet it is Airtel which is ahead in the postpaid segment adding the most number of users in the previous two quarters. One of the reasons behind Airtel being ahead of Jio in the postpaid market is its ‘superior market execution’. The telco’s primary postpaid customers are enterprises that don’t focus a lot on the plans’ pricing, instead focus on the quality of services they get. In the December quarter, Airtel’s mobile revenues were Rs 14,779 crore, which indicated a sequential growth of 6.8%. The telco reported its postpaid user base to be around 16 million users in the previous quarter. It further reported a higher average data usage per month by the users to 16.4GB and voice calling to 1,027 minutes.
