Almost One in Five Singapore Connections are 3G

Singapore's three mobile players have recorded fourth quarter net additions figures closer together than ever, with Singtel, M1 and Starhub taking 29.6%, 39.5% and 30.9% of the new customers, respectively, between September and December. Q4 2006 saw MobileOne (M1) - now Singapore's smallest operator - record the highest number of net additions in the market, as a result of reducing overall churn to a low for the year of 1.3% per month.

The performance ends many quarters of net additions dominance by Starhub, which pushed M1 from second to third position in the market at the beginning of 2005. At 0.223m, the number of net new customers added in Q4 2006 in the market as a whole was also the highest quarterly increase since Q2 2001, when Singapore was only 72.4% penetrated. At the end of 2006 the ratio of mobile connections to heads of population in Singapore reached 1.026, after an abberation due to the disconnection of unregistered prepaid customers mid-way through the year.

At the end of 2006, 3G customers made up 19.1% of the national mobile customer base in Singapore, up from 16.9% at the end of September and just 4.1% at the end of 2005. M1 enjoyed the highest rate of adoption of third generation services by the end of the year, with more than a quarter of its 1.34m customers on a 3G plan, leading Singtel with 21% and StarHub with 11%. Only two third of StarHub's net fourth quarter connections were onto its W-CDMA network, whereas M1 managed 96% and Singtel saw another fall in its GSM base, with 108k net W-CDMA connections against only 66k overall.

Overall, there were 4.64m mobile customers in Singapore at the end of 2006, up 9% from 4.26m at the end of 2005 despite a drop of almost 4% in Q2 2006 due to the prepaid registration programme. Despite its stronger fourth quarter performance M1 lost 0.44pp of market share between January and December, with StarHub taking over 95% of this gain, and Singtel the 0.02pp remainder. StarHub was the notable ARPU performer with consistent increases in its average prepaid spend throughout 2006, resulting in an overall improvement from S$23 per customer per month in 2005 to S$27 in 2006.

By contrast, Singtel managed just a S$1 increase from S$12 to S$13 on the same basis, whilst M1's average fell from S$21 to S$19. Contract ARPU remained very stable at all three operators throughout the year, the most significant change being at Singtel, where the average postpaid spend was up just over 1% year on 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 20th February 2007