Asia Pacific Q3 2006 Regional Customer Growth Update

Because China accounts for such a large part of the region's mobile customer base, it has a strong influence on the trend in South East Asian customer growth as a whole. As close observers of the Chinese market will know, its growth has always been measured and linear, even "controlled", and this - combined with the ever-increasing maturity of other large markets such as Japan and South Korea - has a tempering effect on the South East Asian region.

Looking more closely at the trend, it becomes clear that there has been a slowing of overall proportionate growth in South East Asia between the second and third quarters of 2006, to 3.8%, after three successive quarters of improving percentages. Proportionate quarterly growth hit an all-time low of 3.3% in Q3 2005, so the performance in Q3 2006 is an improvement year on year. However, five of the last seven reported quarters have now produced proportionate customer growth rates below 4%, whereas every historical quarter prior to 2005 exceeded this rate.

Growth in South Asia also slowed in Q3 2006 compared to Q2 2006, and also improved year on year. However, current customer growth in South Asia is much more erratic, and of course much faster, than that in any other Asian region. Net additions fell here between the second and third quarters, but only by 1%, compared to 6% in South East Asia.

This caused the proportionate growth rate to fall rather more severely from 20.4% to 16.8% quarter on quarter, although this is a marginal improvement on 16.3% in Q3 2005, and impressive given that at 27m net additions in Q3 2006 were more than double the 13m seen in Q3 2005.

To round off the picture of the Asian market, we should mention the third sub-region of Australasia & Pacific, although this is somewhat off the radar compared to its two much bigger sisters. The Pacific islands exert only a very small influence on the total - only Fiji, French Polynesia, New Caledonia and Papua New Guinea have customer bases over 0.1m - and so growth in the sub-region is essentially a weighted average of Australia and New Zealand.

Telecom New Zealand cleaned out many of its inactive customers in Q2 2006 which, combined with a complete stagnation of growth in Australia, caused the overall Australasia & Pacific growth rate to drop below zero for the first time. Despite Vodafone New Zealand following suit with inactive disconnections of its own in Q3 2006, the New Zealand market as a whole posted 1.8% growth to match Australia, which also found its feet again with a 1.8% increase. The result was a proportionate increase in customers in the sub-region of 1.9% in the third quarter of 2006, down on 2.5% in the same quarter of the previous year.

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 10th January 2007