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European Mobile Subscriber Growth Falls to Sixth Successive Low
Quarterly net additions in the European mobile market moved to their highest level so far in 2008 in the third quarter, hitting 13.7m, after 9.8m and 11.0m in the first two quarters respectively. Proportionate growth followed suit, climbing to 1.8%, from 1.3% and 1.5% in the two prior periods.
However, excepting the first two quarters of 2008 the net additions total was lower than any other result since Q2 04, whilst the proportionate growth figure was lower than any in history, which had the effect of pulling rolling annual customer growth down to a sixth successive low of 8.2%, down from 13.0% in the year to 30 September 2007.
Annual net additions fell to close to 2004 levels, down from 81.9m in the year to September 2007 to just 58m in the following 12 month period.
As a result of the progress in the quarter, the total number of mobile connections in Europe increased to 768.3m from 709.9m a year earlier, lifting penetration from 108% to 116%. Europe remains the second biggest world region in terms of customer numbers, behind Asia Pacific with 1.64bn and ahead of the Middle East & Africa with 482m. In terms of penetration it stands more than 25pp ahead of its nearest rival, Russia & Central Asia, which finished Q3 08 with a rate of 90.7%, the penetration rate having overtaken that in North America in the second quarter. Despite the mobile ownership rate remaining more than 30pp higher in Europe than in North Ameri ca, Europe was still faster growing in Q3 08, for the eighth time in the last nine quarters (the exception coming in Q1 08).
The European mobile market is absolutely dominated by GSM technology - at least technologies from the GSM family.
Whilst GSM's share of the total fell from 89.9% to 84.8% over the year to 30th September, the contribution of W-CDMA reached almost 15%, more than 5pp over the year. The total number of 3G customers in Europe increased by 63% in the year to reach almost 116m by the end of Q3 08, of which 99.6% were accounted for by W- CDMA. However, overall, customer numbers in the GSM family increased by only 8.19% in the period, just below the continental average of 8.22%. This implies that the small CDMA base grew faster than the average, which indeed it did, by 40% in the year to 1.23m - 0.16% of the European total.
Posted to the site on 8th January 2009
This article was extracted from The Mobile World Briefing, the weekly newsletter from The Mobile World.
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