Falkland Islands Sees First Year of Mobile Phones

The Falkland Islands only saw mobile services introduced at the end of 2005, and so it was no surprise that the year-on-year growth rate in the South Atlantic territory topped the list for the CALA (Caribbean & Latin America) region. In fact, the 250% growth between the end of 2005 and the end of 2006 was not as much of a statistical quirk as it might appear, as it saw penetration in the Falklands move just over 20% to almost 80% on the back of considerable pent-up demand.

Second in the growth ranking was the Caribbean's third largest market, Haiti, which saw an explosion in mobile service take-up after Digicel's launch in May 2006. Almost all of the growth came courtesy of Digicel itself, which crossed the 1m customer mark in early January 2007, the market's incumbents having so far mustered little by way of response. Nevertheless, penetration in Haiti at the end of 2006 was still only 18%, so in absolute terms the real growth has yet to come.

Trinidad and Tobago was the other large market where Digicel launched greenfield operations in 2006, and despite penetration here standing at almost 90% when it entered, the year's growth still put the market fourth in the continental ranking.

In all, eleven more markets recorded proportionate customer growth in excess of 50% in 2006. Uruguay was the top placed mainland South American country in third place with growth in its mobile customer base of 90.5% in the 12 months, whilst Honduras took the honours for Central America, with an 81.6% increase, despite the persistence (for the time being at least) of the duopoly in that market.

Whereas there is a good mix of markets from all three sub-regions of CALA in the upper order of the table, the lower order is dominated by the very well developed Caribbean markets. The nine slowest growing markets were all from the region, although only four of these failed to top 10% growth in the year. The slowest growing South American market was Bolivia, tenth from bottom, as Millicom's GSM-driven growth in 2006 failed to stimulate market leader Entel (still owned by Telecom Italia) into any kind of life.

The CALA region's two biggest markets, Mexico and Brazil, recorded customer growth of 21.4% and 16.0% respectively in the year, which was only enough to put them 27th and 32nd respectively in the ranking. Nevertheless such is their size that they topped the ranking in terms of absolute growth with ease, the 23.8m net additions in the two markets in 2006 accounting for 35% of the entire region's total.

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 3rd April 2007