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Mobistar - MVNOs Boost Growth but ARPU Drops Again
Third-party net additions have outstripped net additions from retail services for the third successive quarter at second-placed Belgian operator, Mobistar, majority owned by France Telecom. The operatorÃ's first MVNO, in the form of quad-play telco Telenet, launched in August 2006 and was followed less than a year later by Lycamobile, the pan-European MVNO offering low-cost international calls. It was this latter player which contributed the bulk of the 155k net additions seen in Q4 2007 - the highest number in any quarter for over six years - whilst the two MVNOs in combination provided 72.7% of the new customers.
The number of net new connections fell 56% to 68k in Q1 2008, but this was still the best first quarter performance by Mobistar since Q1 2001. In this latest quarter, the MVNOs contributed 60.2% of the growth, equivalent to 41k customers in absolute terms - up from just 15k in the same quarter last year.
MobistarÃ's own retail business managed to make 27k new connections on a net basis in the period - an improvement of just over 1,000 customers compared to the number added in the first quarter of 2007.
Last year, Mobistar bought Luxembourg operator VOX, and this finished March with just over 74k customers, up by just under 6,000 year on year. Without VOX, the Mobistar Group surpassed the 3.5m customer barrier with some ease in the first quarter, having finished last year with a base of 3.49m; including VOX, the total base climbed to 3.62m in the first three months of 2008. The result was a 13.7% annual increase in customer numbers on an actual basis, or 11.4% on a pro-forma basis which is nevertheless an impressive result.
At Mobistar Belgium, there were 365k net additions in the year - almost 1,000 per day - a figure that market leader Proximus will do very well to beat when it reports results in mid-May.
Nevertheless, it was not all roses for the French-owned company, as ARPU dropped to a new low of €33.67 per month, a decline of €4.50 or 12% year on year. Termination and roaming rates were cut again by the Belgian regulator in February, after similar cuts in May and September 2007, whilst competition continued to exert further pressure. The result was a decline in Q1 service revenues of almost €15m to €343m, although the inclusion of €8.7m of revenues for VOX in the 2008 figures mitigated the year on year decline at the Group level to 2.2%, or €7.8m.
Posted to the site on 1st May 2008
This article was extracted from The Mobile World Briefing, the weekly newsletter from The Mobile World.
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