The Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy (CMIE) has released a report on the telecom space, say news reports. According to the same, despite a decline in the customer base over the past few months, telecom companies are likely to add 48.9 million new subscribers in financial year 2013-14, with an emphasis on deeper penetration in rural areas.
The report added that the recent fall in subscriber numbers (nearly 36 million) is mainly owing to the implementation of mobile number portability (MNP) and the clean-up exercise by service providers. The telecom user base is expected to increase in the next fiscal, owing to the operators? focus on rural areas.
The report adds that while the urban areas are ‘over-penetrated’ with a teledensity of 159.5 per cent, in rural teledensity is only 40.6 per cent. “This indicates that these areas hold a lot of opportunities for operators to grow their subscriber base,” the report stated.
In the current fiscal, it expects telecom operators to lose 35.9 million subscribers. This decline would be partly because of the clean-up exercise by mobile service providers and also because of the exit of the companies who have lost licenses.
Since the implementation of MNP in January 2011, over 75 million subscribers have opted for the facility. Also, around 30 million users had their connections disconnected during July-October last year due to the operators? clean-up activity.
