Reliance Jio will lead the mobile services market during 2020-2025 in India – ahead of Bharti Airtel and Vodafone Idea, the latest research report from GlobalData said.

Jio’s strong foothold in the prepaid segment, wide 4G subscription base as well as focus on 5G services deployment will help the operator retain its leading position during the forecast period, GlobalData said.

Reliance Jio will lead the mobile services market in 2020, followed by Airtel India and Vodafone Idea.

Deepa Dhingra, telecom analyst at GlobalData, said: “4G will remain the leading mobile technology in India over 2020-2025 as operators such as Vodafone Idea and Airtel continue to expand their LTE networks. Operators like Airtel have been planning to completely refarm 3G network for 4G usage to drive 4G subscription share.”

Mobile subscription penetration in India is set to cross 100 percent mark in 2023 from 88.3 percent in 2020, driven by growing smartphone adoption and increasing coverage of 4G- long-term evolution (LTE) services across remote areas.

The impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on the mobile sector will be mild and mobile service revenues will grow at a 9.1 percent compound annual growth rate (CAGR) over 2020-2025, primarily driven by growth in the mobile data services segment.

Mobile data service revenues are set to grow at a robust CAGR of 18.3 percent during 2020-2025, with rising adoption of 4G data-centric plans to support growing consumption of online video content over smartphones.