Less than a year ago, there were seven mobile service providers in India with at least eight million customer accounts. Today, only three firms remain: Vodafone-Idea; Reliance Jio and Bharti Airtel.
That is how rapid the mobile service provider market consolidation has occurred.
To be sure, the Indian mobile market had been unusually fragmented. But over the next decade we are likely to see an accelerated consolidation trend globally, as subscriber growth and even mobile data revenue gains flatten out in all markets, as they now are doing in developed markets.
When organic growth stops, telecom firms always look to acquisitions.
