New Zealand Q4 2006 Market Update
The two New Zealand operators, Telecom and Vodafone, shared almost equally in fourth quarter net additions, with the incumbent winning by just a small margin of 53% to 47%. The result gave Telecom another 0.3pp of market share to add to the 0.6pp it picked up in Q3 2006, but even with both quarters in aggregate the operator has pulled back less than half of the 2pp it lost in the first half of the year.
The reason for Telecom's loss of share was its disconnection of around 200k inactive customers from its legacy AMPS/TDMA base, although the reason for its 0.6pp gain immediately afterwards was a rationalisation of its own customer base by Vodafone. The picture of the market at the end of 2006 is therefore probably the truest reflection of the real state of the New Zealand market for some time.
At the end of Q4 2006, Vodafone held a majority 55.1% of the market to Telecom's 44.9% - a gap which equates to around 0.4m customers in absolute terms. It is worth pointing out, however, that we use Telecom's active customer numbers (rather than its registered figures which are 70-80k higher), whereas Vodafone's numbers are stated on a registered basis. The market share figures quoted may still flatter Vodafone slightly, therefore, especially given the higher level of inactivity generally present in a GSM customer base as against the CDMA base which Telecom New Zealand has.
On that note, the news that Telstra in Australia plans to follow smaller rival Hutchison Telecom by completely closing down its CDMA operations by March 2008, can be seen as nothing other than a major blow to Telecom. Not only will it lose roaming capability for its customers when visiting Australia, it will also lose Telstra's CDMA roaming traffic coming the other way. Instead, by next year all of Telstra's customers will be using GSM or "NextG" W-CDMA technology, and will therefore roam onto rival Vodafone's network when in New Zealand.
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 13th February 2007