UK Knocked Out of Subscriber Base "Top 10" Ranking
Barring a third-quarter miracle in the United Kingdom mobile market, Pakistan has ousted the European country to take tenth place in the global mobile market rankings by customers. The size of the base in Pakistan grew to exceed 70 million at the end of September by a margin of just a few thousand customers, meaning that the UK would have to have added 2.3 million new connections in the third quarter - twice as many as it achieved in the same period last year - to maintain its position.
Click to enlarge
Pakistan customers vs near-ranked markets
Market share of customers and net additions
Pakistan has moved up five places in the global ranking in the year to 30th September 2007. First it overtook Spain in Q4 2006, although as it was overtaken itself by Ukraine the market remained in 15th place. Next in Q1 2007 it moved back ahead of Ukraine, also leaving behind both France and Turkey to gain twelfth place. Then eleventh place was stolen from Mexico in the second quarter, in advance of an entrance into the top ten in September.
However, with average net additions of 7.19 million per quarter so far this year, Pakistan is unlikely to progress any further in the near future: Italy is next in line in ninth place (having itself been overtaken in Q3 by Indonesia) but with a base of around 82-83 million at the end of September it is safe from Pakistan's assault until well into 2008.
In the year to September 2007, the Pakistan market saw 28.55 million new mobile connections shared between its six players - equivalent to growth of 69%.
Telenor was the clear out-performer, taking 28% of the net additions since September 2006 from a position of just 11.1% overall market share a year ago. As a result, Telenor gained almost 7pp of market share by the end of the year, cementing its lead over nearest rival Warid Telecom, which ended September 2007 with 17% of the market after growth of 20.8%. Pakistan Telecom's U-Fone subsidiary was more or less on level par, as a 23% share of the year's new connections saw its overall market share position improve slightly from 21.4% to 22.0%. Giving the majority of the ground was market leader Mobilink, which lost 8pp of market share to end on 40.8%. Having said this, the Orascom company's losses stablised in September 2007 to just 0.1pp, having been considerably in excess of this in every month since January 2006. The market leader finished the quarter with a base of 28.6 million, up 8.3 million in the year and 2.1m in the quarter.
In September, China Mobile's recent acquisition Paktel - now renamed CM Pak - put in its best performance since the takeover with almost 200k net additions. This would seem to be a sign that the new owners are finally breathing some life into the operation, although it has a long way to climb: with a base of just 1.2 million customers at the end of September 2007, equivalent to 1.8% of the national total, CM Pak is more than 10 million customers and 15pp of market share behind its nearest rival, Warid. We say "nearest rival", although strictly speaking this honour goes to Pakcom (which like Paktel was formerly a Millicom subsidiary) which finished Q3 2007 with a base of 337k and a market share of just 0.5%.
Posted to the site on 30th October 2007
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
