We are a little intrigued with the unequal revenue uplift across the top three telecom operators in India.
Vodafone Idea's weak print can be explained by the company continuing to lose subscribers, especially at the low end. VIL’s subscriber mix within the mid/high-end segments also seems to be deteriorating. What is particularly intriguing is that Jio's qoq revenue growth was similar to VIL’s and substantially below Airtel.
Jio's off-net traffic mix moved significantly in favor of incoming after the company’s move to charge explicitly for offnet-outgoing calls starting Oct 2019; this move would have yielded a significant jump in termination revenues for R-Jio (versus 2Q levels), in our view. Note that we are ignoring the revenue uplift on account of the explicit charging of offnet-outgoing calls itself. If we were to include this, the math would be even tougher to understand.
Smartphone LTE subs for Jio were perhaps flattish, 4Q over 2Q, or may have even declined. We note that Bharti added 33.2 mn smartphone LTE subs during this timeframe.
