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Acquisitions Boosting US Companies' Growth Rates
The acquisitions of Dobson, Rural and Suncom have served to boost the number of net additions over the past twelve months at AT&T, Verizon and T-Mobile respectively. AT&T already has Centennial in its sights for 2009, while VerizonÃ's acquisition of Alltel is set for closure imminently. As yet, T- Mobile has announced no riposte and in fact, it is difficult to see that there is a meaningful acquisition it could make, unless it wants to enter the murky world of CDMA which it has shown no inclination to do so far.
These three names head the list of companies with the fastest absolute growth rates over the last year, with gains of 9.21m, 7.11m and 4.40m respectively. Fourth placed Alltel is well behind the leaders with just 1.38m, while MetroPCS is the last company to break the million mark, with 1.18m. The bottom half of the table is dominated by the large Canadian companies, though all three have been bettered by Leap Wireless of the USA, which added 0.75m new customers over the year.
Rogers, the largest of CanadaÃ's three main operators, added 606k new customers over the last year, marginally more than TelusÃ' 575k and some way ahead of BCEÃ's 428k. Frankly though none of these are impressive gains and we wonder when the three are going to wake up to the prospect of real competition from Orascom, a company that has four times as many customers as the three of them put together? (Five times as many if WeatherÃ's WIND companies are included). Do the words "scale advantage" have any resonance in Canada? It seems not, as one would have thought the incumbents would be looking to contract as many of the unserved population as possible ahead of GlobaliveÃ's "late Spring 09" launch.
Looking at these numbers on a proportionate basis underlines the point. The large Canadians are the eighth, ninth and tenth fastest growing, with proportionate gains of 10.6% (Telus), 8.3% (Rogers) and 1.8% (BCE). They have been bettered by their compatriots MTS (+11.4%) and by six US operators. The fastest growth came from MetroPCS (+32.3%), but Leap, with 27.6% was close. T-Mobile, AT&T, Verizon and Alltel (with 15.9%, 14.0%, 11.2% and 11.1% respectively) complete the list.
Posted to the site on 10th December 2008
This article was extracted from The Mobile World Briefing, the weekly newsletter from The Mobile World.
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