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Canada's Mobile Penetration Rate Rises to 61.6%
The Canadian mobile market had another quiet quarter, as operators prepared for the 2GHz spectrum auction. This saw most of the available bandwidth going to the three large players, Rogers, Bell and Telus, but no fewer than 12 new entrants acquired licences. In total, the aution raised CA$4.25bn. The new entrants include 9193-2962 Quebec Inc (CA$554m, for Quebec), Globalive Wireless, which paid CA$442m for a national licence, Data & Audio-Visual Enterprises which won licences for Ontario, Vancouver, Edmonton, Calgary and Victoria at a cost of CA$243m and Shaw Communications, which paid CA$190m for spectrum in British Colombia, Alberta, Winnipeg, Saskatchewan and northern Ontario.
During the quarter, there were just over 385k new connections, taking the total to 20.73m and increasing penetration to 61.6%. This is much the lowest level of any developed world market and we would expect the new entrants to stir up the market considerably.
Rogers is slowly extending its lead over its main rival, Bell Mobility and Telus. It connected 270k new customers in the quarter to take its total to 7.68m. It now has 1.34m more than Bell and 1.85m more than Telus, compared with 1.16m and 1.70m at the end of March. It follows from this that neither of the smaller companies matched its quarterly gain. In fact, even taken together their 80k and 180k gains donÃ't match RogersÃ' total. Bell ended the quarter with 6.33m and Telus, 5.83m. Together, these three account for over 95% of the market. The rest divides between two regional operators, MTS from Manitoba and SaskTel from Saskatchewan. The latter is marginally larger, with some 0.482m customers against just over 0.4m at MTS.
All three main operators have managed to maintain their ARPUs at high levels over the course of the year. Rogers produced the best result, as it saw contract spend rise from CA$70.18 to CA$73.95 and prepaid from CA$15.58 to CA$16.27. On a blended basis, this equates to an increase of 6.3%, from CA$59.39 to CA$63.13. Bell MobilityÃ's average spend remained steady at CA$53, while Telus saw a slight decline, from CA$63.70 to CA$62.70.
Posted to the site on 9th September 2008
This article was extracted from The Mobile World Briefing, the weekly newsletter from The Mobile World.
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