T-Mobile Resurgent in Hungary
Hungary's telecoms regulator NHH has reported customer numbers for September 2007, which reveal that the total market grew to just under 10.50m customers on a registered basis, and 9.65m on an active basis. Penetration stood at 97% at the end of Q3. Over 190k new customers were connected in the third quarter, with September's figure of 79k net additions the highest of the calendar year so far.
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Net Additions (000s), Active Customers, Jan 07 - Sep 07
In fact, there were significantly more new connections in the third quarter than in the first two quarters combined, with just 24k in the three months to the end of March and 83k in the three months to the end of June. This is not a particularly extraordinary result, however, as the third quarter is traditionally the second strongest of the year in Hungary behind the fourth quarter. Having said that, growth in Q3 07 was considerably higher than in Q3 06, although with proportionate growth rates of 2.0% and 1.3% respectively neither period provided much to raise the collective pulse.
In terms of individual performances, T-Mobile took the lion's share of third quarter net additions with 117k, 61% of the total. Monthly figures of 56k and 49k in August and September were the drivers behind this performance. They were also the top two results for any operator in 2007 so far, and broke a three-month trend of second place finishes in the figures for net additions, a trend which itself reversed three months of net losses. With 2.8% growth in the third quarter, T-Mobile led the market, although Vodafone was not far behind with 2.5%.
In the nine months to the end of September, Vodafone was the fastest growing of the three operators with a 4.4% growth rate, ahead of T-Mobile (3.4%) and Pannon GSM (2.1%). Vodafone added 51k customers in the third quarter with September's figure of 24k its highest monthly total of the year so far. Meanwhile, Pannon GSM recorded the lowest figure in the market for net additions for four straight months following two market-leading results in April and May. The Q3 total for net additions at the Telenor owned company was just 22k.
Despite T-Mobile's dominance in August and September, the market share figures show surprisingly little change since the end of Q3 2006. T-Mobile remained unchanged on 45.0%, while Pannon lost 0.4pp to hit 33.3% at the end of September 2007, with Vodafone adding 0.2pp to finish on 21.6%. (The effects of rounding account for the discrepancy between Pannon's loss and Vodafone's gain.) In absolute terms, T-Mobile has 4.35m customers to Pannon's 3.22m and Vodafone's 2.09m.
The seasonal fluctuations in the Hungarian market may, at first glance, give the impression of volatility, but in fact nothing could be further from the truth: the changes are small in absolute terms and this is a clearly segmented, highly stable market.
Posted to the site on 14th November 2007
This article was extracted from The Mobile World Briefing, the weekly newsletter from The Mobile World.
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