Who are the Fastest Growing Operators in Asia-Pacific?
No fewer than 16 companies added more than 5 million customers over the course of the twelve months ended June 07. China Mobile heads the list with a massive 58.6 million customers - as many as the next three operators put together, and then some. As we have suggested before, it would take a genuinely radical restructuring of China's communications industry to threaten the company's world leading position and that seems unlikely.
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Largest MNOs by Net Additons
In aggregate, just over 75 million new customers were connected in China over the last year, with the balance of 16.55 million coming from Unicom. That number wasn't enough to give the Chinese number two the regional number two spot, which goes to Bharti of India. Over the same period, India's number one added just under 20 million new connections - 19.63 million to be precise. That equates to 28% of the Indian market's growth and it is little surprise to see that a further four Indian companies come into the regional top ten.
However, India is not the only growth market in the region and in fact, fourth place goes to a company that is based rather further east. Although its place in the rankings is under threat from Bharti, amongst others, Telkomsel of Indonesia was the fourth largest operator in the region at the end of June (and the tenth largest in the world), having added over 13 million new connections in the twelve month period.
The four other Indian companies take fifth, sixth, seventh and ninth places, while two operators from Pakistan fill the other slots.
Vodafone India is experiencing the same kind of resurgence that was experienced by Telsim in Turkey, following its acquisition by the UK global leader. Hutchison undoubtedly did a good job building up this business, but equally, there can be little doubt that Vodafone can take the company one stage further. The need to invest in its troublesome European 3G assets rather constrained Hutchison's ability to invest here; Vodafone, now that the proposal from Efficient Capital Structures has been laughed out of court, suffers no such problem. There can be little doubt that the ultimate aim is to achieve market leadership in India, overtaking Reliance and Bharti. The first part of this has probably already been achieved, the second may take a little longer.
BSNL, Reliance and IDEA are the other three Indian names in the top ten. They may have something to say about this ambition, but none has the financial firepower to match Vodafone if it is genuinely determined. BSNL took sixth place in the ranking of the fastest growing companies in the year with just under 10 million new connections. Reliance would have beaten BSNL had it not been for the SIM registration effect, but in the long term, it may be hampered by its initial choice of CDMA technology. "Choice" is perhaps slightly unfair as Reliance's licence were initially for wireless local loop operations which subsequently became mobile, but one way or another, it could be a problem. As readers of this Briefing will know from our comments on Vivo in Brazil, converting to GSM (if that is Reliance's intention - and it already has some operations operating this technology) is neither cheap nor easy. Finally in India, IDEA has recently raised additional capital in an IPO and this is helping fuel its growth. It connected 7.59 million customers over the year.
Pakistan's population is less than one sixth the size of India's but it takes the two other places through Pakistan Mobile (+9.33 million) and Telenor Pakistan (+7.5 million). In fact, both Pakistan Telecom and Warid Telecom Pakistan also managed to add more than 5 million customers, with net additions of 6.5 million and 5.8 million respectively. The chart shows all 16 of the 5 million+ club.
Posted to the site on 10th October 2007
This article was extracted from The Mobile World Briefing, the weekly newsletter from The Mobile World.
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