Telenor Pakistan Marches Towards Second Place
At the end of 2007, there were 76.88 million mobile connections in Pakistan, which represents a penetration rate of 45.0%. Annual net additions stood at 28.44 million, slightly up on the 26.79 million recorded in 2006, although on a proportionate basis growth more than halved from 123.8% to 58.7%.
Click to enlarge
Annual Net Additions, Top 4 Operators, 2007 vs 2006
Market Share,Top 4 Operators, Q3 05 - Q4 07
Mobilink is the market leader in Pakistan by some distance with 30.61 million customers, 14.45 million ahead of its nearest rival. This margin grew by almost 2 million year on year. However, Mobilink has seen its market share drop in every quarter since Q4 05 and it finished 2007 with 39.8%, an annual decline of 6.6pp. The key reason for this is the strong performances of third- and fourth-placed operators Telenor and Warid, which were the two fastest-growing in the market for the second year running.
Telenor recorded a 119.1% annual growth rate, down from 256.6% in 2006, while Warid posted a 73.4% rate, down from 268.6%. Telenor’s performance was particularly impressive, its figure for annual net additions of 7.94 million being only just behind Mobilink’s 8.12 million. This was in marked contrast to the previous year, when Mobilink recorded 11.37 million new connections compared to 4.79 million for Telenor. Meanwhile, Warid registered a marginal improvement, from 5.55 million new connections in 2006 to 5.59 million in 2007.
The second largest operator in Pakistan is the Pakistan Telecom operated U-fone, which had 16.16 million customers at the end of 2007.
Like Telenor and Warid, it saw an improvement to its figure for annual net additions from 4.84 million in 2006 to 6.15 million in 2007, but its proportionate growth rate fell from 93.4% to 61.3%. In terms of market share, it gained 0.3pp year on year to finish 2007 on 21.0%, but this was not enough to prevent Telenor closing the gap to just 1.0pp at the end of the year. Telenor added 5.2pp in the year, and Warid also gained 1.5pp to finish on 17.2%. The latest monthly figures from the Pakistani regulator show that U-fone had widened the market share gap to 1.1pp at the end of February, although in real terms the deficit had been reduced to just 0.83 million, from 1.57 million at the end of 2007 and 3.36 million at the end of 2006.
The remaining two operators are Pakcom and Paktel.
Pakcom had just 0.33 million customers and 0.4% market share at year-end, and has had its licence terminated according to reports. Paktel is a subsidiary of China Mobile, which recently announced that it was renaming the operator as 'Zong’. Since the Chinese giant’s acquisition, Paktel’s performance has generally been disappointing, although the latest quarterly result suggests that its fortunes are beginning to turn, with 0.75 million net additions in Q4, a 60.7% growth rate. It will have to work hard to trouble the major operators however, as it had just 1.98 million customers at the end of 2007.
Posted to the site on 23rd April 2008
This article was extracted from The Mobile World Briefing, the weekly newsletter from The Mobile World.
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