Asia Pacific Q3 2006 Market Rankings

There have been some notable changes in the Asian market rankings by customer base size in Q3 2006, disturbing the previous calm equilibrium. The main protagonist in the most recent developments has been Pakistan which climbed from eighth place at the end of June 2006 to fifth at the end of September. That it would overtake seventh placed Thailand was never in doubt, as it stood just 16k customers behind the South East Asian market at the end of June.

However, Pakistan also went on to leapfrog both the Philippines and South Korea during the third quarter, ending the period with 41.5m customers. The top four markets remained unchanged quarter on quarter, with China leading from India, Japan and Indonesia.

As a result of Pakistan's advance, Thailand has dropped one place from seventh to eighth, ahead of Taiwan and Malaysia, which remain in ninth and tenth places respectively. The only other change was that the Philippines and South Korea swapped places, both having been overtaken by Pakistan, the result being that the Philippines maintained its sixth place, whilst South Korea was bumped down two rungs, from fifth to seventh.

The ranking of Asian markets by net additions forms an interesting comparison with the ranking by customer base size. India tops the list with 17.1m net additions in Q3 2006, whilst China comes second with 16.9m and Pakistan third with 7.3m. Indonesia is fourth, by both customer base and net additions, with 3.5m new customers in July, August and September 2006, and Thailand fifth as phenomenal growth from TrueMove helped the market to a record 2.38m increase.

This article was extracted from The Mobile World Briefing, the weekly newsletter from The Mobile World. To download a sample issue of the Briefing in PDF format, please click here. For more information including full subscription pricing, please visit The Mobile World"

Posted to the site on 9th January 2007