Aircel, a Maxis joint venture in India, has informed TRAI that it will be stopping its mobile services in Gujarat, Maharashtra, Haryana, Himachal Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh and Uttar Pradesh West shortly.
Earlier, the discussion between Aircel and Reliance Communications for combining their wireless businesses did not materialize due to regulatory issues and uncertainty over its involvement in court cases.
Aircel informed TRAI (Telecom Regulatory Authority of India) on December 1, 2017 that the telecom operator is forced to surrender its license in these 6 mobile circles due to non-viability of business due to hyper competition in the India telecom market. India has more than one billion mobile subscriptions.
Aircel CEO Kaizad Heerjee informed TRAI: “In view of the licensing and regulatory changes in the last 7-8 years and the hyper competition now prevalent in the telecom industry, Aircel is facing difficult and economically unviable conditions to run business operations in the six circles and will surrender the mobile licenses.”
The competition has earlier forced Reliance Communications, another top mobile service provider, to stop its 2G and 3G services across India. Tata Teleservices has offered its wireless business to Bharti Airtel. Airtel has also acquired the Indian telecom business from Telenor.
Towards the end of the year, India will have three major telecom operators: Airtel, Vodafone-Idea, and Reliance Jio from the private sector and BSNL from the government. The consolidation started when Reliance Jio started offering free voice and data services from September 2016.
Aircel has lost 497,264 subscribers in the month of October 2017 or 0.56 percent of its total wireless subscribers. For comparison, Reliance Jio, the leading 4G operator in India, has achieved 5.3 percent growth in subscriber additions and Airtel gained 1.12 percent in October.
Aircel has a total subscriber base of 88,254,714 in India including 31,498,013 in rural locations.
Aircel has 15,459 subscribers in Gujarat, 2,211,506 in Maharashtra, 3092 in Haryana, 867,914 in Uttar Pradesh West, 20,552 in Madhya Pradesh and 1,028,433 in Himachal Pradesh.
Baburajan K
