India's private telecoms firms offering CDMA-based mobile services said on Saturday 259,233 customers signed up in April, boosting the mobile base to 34.56 million in the world's fastest growing major wireless market.
Data from the Association of Basic Telecom Operators (ABTO), which represents six companies, said its user base at the end of April stood at 7.41 million customers, up 3.6 percent from March when more than 400,000 users had opted for CDMA services.
S.C. Khanna, secretary general at ABTO, told Reuters the drop in growth rates in April was mainly because operators had launched attractive schemes in March to lure users and those tariff plans were not extended in the past month.
On Friday, rival firms offering GSM-based mobile services reported their user base had grown by just under a million customers in April to 27.15 million subscribers.
As a consequence only 1.25 million users entered the flourishing mobile sector in April compared with 1.9 million in the previous month and 1.63 million in February, pointing to slowing growth in the sector.
Some analysts have blamed the slowdown in subscribers to a combination of slow network expansion by a few carriers in remote and untapped areas, cost constraints and high duties levied by the government on telecoms equipment and handsets.
But Khanna said he was confident subscriber numbers would pick up in the coming months as leading CDMA operators such as Reliance Infocomm Ltd, 45 percent owned by Reliance Industries Ltd, and the Tata group were extending their reach.
Reliance Infocomm, India's largest CDMA-based mobile services provider with 6.74 million users, is planning to expand its services to 4,000 towns and cities this year from 1,100 now.