Half a Billion Customers in Top 10 European Markets

In the last of our quarterly roundups of the European market, we reported that the Ukraine had almost certainly overtaken France in January to become Europe's fifth largest market by customers. The Q1 2007 figures confirm this to have been the case, with Ukraine registering 2m net additions in the quarter to take its total to 51m, 1.5m ahead of France which finished with 49.5m mobile customers. Given the rapid deceleration of growth in Ukraine which took place in Q1 2007, it now looks unlikely that the market will progress any further; indeed one day one would expect the under-penetrated France - almost a third larger than Ukraine by population - to retake fifth place.

For the moment, however, the ranking looks stable, with no other changes of position likely this year.

Europe's largest market is Germany, where the number of mobile connections exceeded the number of heads of population for the first time in Q1 2007, rising to almost 84m. Second largest by population is Turkey, although penetration here has only just entered the fourth quartile, so its ranking position by mobile customer numbers remains fourth. Remaining in second and third places by customers at the end of Q1 2007 were Italy and the United Kingdom, with totals of 79.2m and 67.5m respectively, making the Italian market 17.4% larger than the UK market at the end of March, against a premium of 14.6% three months earlier. Behind Turkey, Ukraine and France in fourth, fifth and sixth positions, respectively, were Spain, Poland, Romania and the Netherlands.

Together these top ten markets accounted for over half a billion or 76% of Europe's 666m customers - with over 230m of these now in the top three markets (Germany, Italy and the UK) alone.

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 19th June 2007