The composition of that top ten has changed substantially over the past decade.
China Mobile crossed one billion subscribers in the second quarter of 2024 and remains in first place by a wide margin.
Reliance Jio, which did not exist before September 2016, is now the world’s second-largest mobile operator and a clear example of how quickly the rankings have moved.
Vodafone Group, long counted second worldwide, has divested operations in India, Italy, Spain, and Australia since 2019 and now sits well outside the top five.
This article runs through the major operators with current subscriber figures, then closes with a fifteen-country table and a short note on what has changed since the industry’s last reshuffle.
China Mobile
China Mobile reached 1.004 billion subscribers in the second quarter of 2024, the first single operator anywhere to pass the one-billion line.
It accounts for roughly 19 percent of all global mobile subscriptions on its own.
The company was carved out of the original China Telecom in 1999 and listed on both the Hong Kong and New York stock exchanges, though it remains majority-owned by the Chinese state.
Growth has slowed sharply as the Chinese market has saturated: China Mobile took until Q4 2014 to reach 800 million subscribers and nearly another full decade to add the next 200 million.
Its 5G subscriber base reached 599 million by the end of 2025, by far the largest 5G network in the world.
In revenue terms China Mobile reported roughly 98.4 billion euros in 2024, comparable to Deutsche Telekom but well below Verizon and AT&T.
Reliance Jio
Reliance Jio launched commercial 4G service across India in September 2016 with an aggressive bundled-data pricing strategy that effectively ended the previous Indian market structure.
Subscriber numbers reached 481.8 million by mid-2024, ranking Jio second worldwide and the largest single-country operator outside China.
Jio is a subsidiary of Reliance Industries, the conglomerate founded by Dhirubhai Ambani and now led by his son Mukesh Ambani; the unit’s data plans in 2025 included tiers as low as roughly US$2.17 for three gigabytes of data, with cricket-season offers pushing that to 15 gigabytes for US$2.73 on a 90-day validity. The combination of low ARPU and very high subscriber volumes is now the standard story across Indian telecoms, and Jio is the operator that set it.
China Telecom
China Telecom, the parent of the 1999 break-up that produced China Mobile, ranks third globally with 422.67 million mobile subscribers in 2024.
Like China Mobile and China Unicom, it is a state-owned enterprise headquartered in Beijing and listed in both Hong Kong and (until 2021) New York.
China Telecom historically held the largest share of the Chinese fixed-line market and entered mobile services later than China Mobile; its mobile business has grown steadily through the 5G transition, with 5G handset subscribers crossing 350 million in 2024.
Bharti Airtel
Bharti Airtel, headquartered at Bharti Crescent in New Delhi, ranked fourth in 2024 with 395.15 million subscribers across India, Sri Lanka, and fourteen African countries.
The company was founded by Sunil Bharti Mittal as Bharti Telecom in 1995, with the Airtel brand launched the same year for mobile service in Delhi. Airtel’s African operations are run through Airtel Africa, listed separately on the London Stock Exchange since 2019, and account for roughly a third of total group subscribers.
Airtel posted the strongest revenue growth of any of the world’s top twenty telcos in the year to Q3 2024 (4.6 percent), driven by ARPU gains in both India and several large African markets.
China Unicom
China Unicom, the third state-owned Chinese carrier, ranked fifth globally in 2024 with 339.3 million mobile subscribers.
The company was created in 1994 to break China Telecom’s then-monopoly on telecommunications services, and it remains the smallest of the three Chinese state operators by mobile market share. China Unicom merged its mobile and fixed-line networks with China Telecom for 5G deployment in 2019, sharing infrastructure to reduce build costs across the country’s vast rural areas.
The Global Multinationals
América Móvil, headquartered in Mexico City and controlled by the family of Carlos Slim, served 323 million mobile subscribers as of 2024, anchored by Telcel in Mexico (the dominant national operator) and Claro brand operations across most of Latin America. Telefónica, headquartered in Madrid, served roughly 300 million across Spain, Brazil (under the Vivo brand), Germany, the United Kingdom, and several other markets, though it has been divesting non-core operations and the global subscriber number has trended down.
Orange, the former France Télécom rebranded in 2013, served 253 million across France, Spain, Belgium, Poland, and twenty-plus African and Middle Eastern markets through its Orange Middle East and Africa subsidiary. MTN Group, headquartered in Johannesburg, served roughly 290 million subscribers across 21 African countries (with Nigeria and South Africa as its two largest markets), making it the largest African operator and the eighth-largest worldwide.
Vodafone Group
The Shard in London, with the wider city skyline of the United Kingdom in the background.
The Shard, London. Vodafone Group is headquartered in the United Kingdom.
Vodafone Group is no longer the world’s second-largest mobile operator.
The company has spent the past six years divesting from markets where it was unable to lead: it sold Vodafone India to merge with Idea Cellular in 2018 (creating the standalone Indian operator Vodafone Idea, in which Vodafone Group retains a 23.2 percent stake); sold Vodafone Italy to Swisscom; sold Vodafone Spain to Zegona Communications in 2023; exited Australia through a merger; and in 2025 merged Vodafone UK with Three UK to create the largest mobile operator in the British market.
The remaining Vodafone Group footprint is concentrated in Germany, the UK (post-Three merger), and African markets where it operates through Vodacom.
Total Vodafone Group mobile subscribers, including Vodacom but excluding the minority-held Vodafone Idea stake, sit in the 270 to 300 million range depending on which businesses are counted in or out, well below the 469.7 million figure that placed Vodafone second worldwide a decade ago.
