Who are the Largest Operators in Lat-Am & Caribbean?

Published on: 27th June 2007

There has not been any change to the ten largest companies in the Caribbean and Latin America over the last quarter region and in fact, neither has there been any change to the overall positioning. However, the quarterly rate of growth that these ten companies are achieving varies quite dramatically - from a low of -0.1% to a high of 16% - so it is likely that there will be changes in the future. As before, America Movil owns four of the top ten and Telefonica three, while Telecom Italia controls one and has a minority interest in another. The last of the ten is independent, or rather, is the mobile subsidiary of a Brazilian regional wireline operator.

América Móvil's Telcel, in Mexico, continues to head this list, with a total of 44.95m customers, up 1.76m on the quarter. Its lead over second placed Vivo (Brasilcel, N.V.) has continued to grow and now stands at 15.9m. Vivo dropped another 22k connections in the quarter, to leave it at just above 29m. However, the operator began selling GSM handsets in Sao Paolo in December and closed the March quarter with around 370k GSM subscribers to its network. The importance of this is not so much that number, but the fact that national roaming will now allow Vivo to offer the same nationwide coverage as the rest of the market. TIM Brasil continues to narrow the gap on the market leader and at the same time, to stretch its lead over Telecom Americas. It closed the quarter with 26.3m customers, up by nearly 900k. Another year in the same vein and TIM will take market leadership, but we expect Vivo to fight back.

Telecom Americas, which trades as Claro, is also based in Brazil and is another America Móvil subsidiary. Like most of the main operators in the country, this is the result of several mergers, which have seen regional B block operators and PCS award winners merge to create a national presence. Telecom Americas ended the quarter with 24.6m customers, up from 23.9m at the end of the year. America Móvil also takes fifth position, through its Comcel subsidiary in Colombia. After very strong growth throughout 2005 and the first two quarters of 2006, the momentum has diminished. Comcel closed the year with 19.5m customers and managed to top 20m at the end of March - just.

A fourth Brazilian company comes in sixth place as it did three months ago. This is TNL PCS (better known as "Oi"), the mobile subsidiary of Tele Norte Leste, one of Brazil's three regional wireline operators. This added another 280k customers in the three months to March to take its total to 13.4m.

All three Argentinean operators feature in the top ten, again. At the end of December they took seventh, eighth and tenth places as they do now. Telefónica Argentina closed the period with 11.8m customers, up more than 0.6m on the quarter. All but 135k of these are mobile; the balance comes from fixed wireless. Its lead over both of its competitors was further eroded in the quarter as both added more customers - 860k and 890k respectively - to take their totals to 10.9m and 9.3m. As the chart below shows, Telefonica has not taken the leading share of customers for well over a year now. Over the period shown, America Movil has taken the lion's share of all net adds with just over 6m, but Telefonica and Telecom Argentina have not lost out that heavily, with aggregate gains of 4.95m amd 4.50m respectively.

Telefónica Moviles Mexico came into this list in the December quarter and retains its ninth place with a total of 9.3m customers, just 7,400 more than Telecom Argentina's Personal unit. At the end of December, there were another five companies in the region with more than 5m customers. Now there are seven. Telcel in Venezuela has edged past CANTV to take the number eleven spot, with 8.22m against 8.13m, while Telefónica Colombia stays in 13th place, despite losing over 200,000 customers as it accelerated the closure of its CDMA network. Conecel in Ecuador didn't quite make the 6m milestone in the quarter, ending with 5.97m, but neither of the two Telefonica subsidiaries - in Chile and Peru - did enough to overtake it. These two ended the period with 5.77m and 5.59m respectively. The last company is Entel Chile, which closed the quarter with 5.1m. This top 10 are shown in the chart below.

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"

 

Tags: [amd]  [telecom italia]  [tim]  [entel]  [america movil]  [telecom argentina]  [tim brasil]  [telcel]  [vivo]  [national roaming]  [latin america]  [caribbean] 

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