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Asia Pacific Operators in Q3 '07: CDMA Staging a Revival?
The three months ended September 30th saw a record number of new connections in the Asia Pacific region. Overall, nearly 85 million new customers were connected which is very nearly as many as Germany, Europe's largest economy, has added in the 22 years since mobile service started. The vast majority of these chose to adopt either GSM or WCDMA technology, these two accounting for 66.1m and 9.4m of the total respectively.
In fact, GSM has now passed the 1bn mark in the region, ending the period with a total of 1.006bn, well ahead of its closest rival, the CDMA standard. We remain convinced that this is in a period of long term decline, but a first glance at the results from the region don't provide any evidence for that, indeed, rather the contrary. After a first quarter in which fewer than 5m new customers opted for CDMA, Q2 saw 8.5m new CDMA connections and Q3, 12.5m - the best quarterly result ever. However, it has to be pointed out that a large part of this was the result of a reclassification of some Indian WLL subscribers as mobile and without this, the numbers are less impressive.
Looking at the individual operators, the picture remains much as before with China and India dominating.
Over the course of the quarter, China Mobile added 17.3m new customers. While this was by far the largest improvement of any operator, anywhere, it was once again insufficient to prevent a decline in regional market share. At the end of September 06, China Mobile accounted for 29.1% of the regional total, this had dropped to 28.3% in March and over the six months since then, it has lost a further one percent. This is almost entirely due to the phenomenal growth in the India, which has increased its share of the regional total from 12.55% one year ago to 16.09% today. Indian companies were the second, third, fourth, fifth, eighth, 13th and 19th fastest growing companies in the region over the quarter, adding an aggregate of 28.6m new connections.
Thanks to that reclassification (of some 4.6m fixed wireless customers) Tata heads the list of Indian operators with 6.75m new mobile customers. Even without this boost, Tata is growing strongly and on an organic basis, it would still be in sixth place. Third, fourth and fifth went to Bharti, Vodafone and Reliance, with gains of 6.2m, 4.9m and 4.5m. By way of comparison, these three were in second, fourth and sixth place in Q2. The other Indian operators with more than one million new connections in the quarter were Idea (+2.55m), BSNL (+1.85m), BPL (+1.30m) and Aircel (+1.26m). Penetration in the country is still well below 20% (compared with 35% in Sri Lanka and 41% in Pakistan) so clearly, there is substantial scope for further growth.
Pakistan itself is also experiencing dramatic growth, with the best part of 7m new customers in the quarter. Pakistan Mobile, the Orascom subsidiary, added 2.1m customers to become the tenth fastest growing operator in the region over the quarter, ahead of Telenor Pakistan (12th, with 1.9m) and Pakistan Telecom, with 1.4m, in 18th. These positions compare with eleventh, 13th and seventh in the June quarter.
The other companies on the list of fastest growing operators were all to be found in one of Indonesia, Thailand and Vietnam. Telekom Malaysia's Excelcomindo took seventh place with 2.6m net adds, ahead of Satelindo (+2.0m) and Telkomsel (+1.65m) in 11th and 14th places respectively. Towards the bottom end of the table, there was a strong showing by all three of the main Vietnamese operators, with Vietnam Mobile (+1.46m) just ahead of Vietnam Telecom (+1.43m) and Viettel (+1.42m).
Posted to the site on 10th January 2008
This article was extracted from The Mobile World Briefing, the weekly newsletter from The Mobile World.
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