Mobile subscribers grow in April, but more slowly

Bharti Airtel, India's leading mobile operator, added 2.81 million mobile users in April, taking total customers to 96.7 million, data from the Cellular Operators' Association of India showed on Wednesday.

Third-ranked Vodafone Essar, majority owned by Vodafone, signed up 2.77 million mobile users in April to take its total users to 71.5 million. The data does not include Reliance Communications Ltd, India's second-largest mobile operator, which reports figures separately. 

Indian GSM mobile operators added 8.97 million subscribers to their networks in April, taking total GSM subscribers to 297.7 million, according to COAI data. This was lower than a 10.8 million GSM users added in the previous month, mainly due to lower subscriber additions by state-run Bharat Sanchar Nigam Ltd that added 1.04 million mobile customers in April, down from 2.5 million in March.

Reliance Communications, which had 72.67 million subscribers at end-March, expanded its GSM mobile services to all the service areas of the country in January, but the majority of its customers are still on the rival CDMA technology.