|
|
Russia and Central Asia Q1 2009 Regional Roundup
The last twelve months has seen a total of 41.8m new customers in the Russia and Central Asia region. Of these, 6.86m came in the final period, the first three months of 2009. This was a marked reduction on earlier growth rates, with almost every market seeing a lower level of new customers than in the prior quarter. Russia was particularly badly affected and unusually, the majority of net adds came from the other countries.
This is only the second time this has happened, the first being in Q1 07. However, the two quarters are not directly comparable - in the first, when Russia added just 1.76m customers, the overall total was materially depressed by Vimpelcom's decision to switch from reporting registered customers to active. This time, there was no such effect and the numbers are a straightforward reflection of demand in the region's largest market. With penetration at over 135% (and overall teledensity some 30ppts above that) it would seem that in future, a majority of the region's growth will come from the smaller countries - at least until such time as the market for 3G datacards develops.
As noted above, Russia is not the only market to experience a slower rate of growth. Kazakhstan, the region's second largest market (with 15.4m connections) added 414k new customers, but this was nearly 0.75m fewer than in Q4. Uzbekistan, the third largest market, was similar: it added an impressive 869k new connections, but that falls well short of the 1.79m seen in Q4. The same pattern was repeated, to a greater or lesser extent, in Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Georgia, Armenia and the two fragmentary markets of Abkhazia and Nagorno-Karabakh. Only three markets produced greater gains in Q1 than in Q4 - Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan and Afghanistan.
The first two saw net gains of 505k and 207k respectively, decent improvements on Q4's numbers, but it is Afghanistan that impresses most. It added 1.33m new customers in Q1, a new record and the second million-plus quarter in succession. It seems that demand for mobile services can flourish irrespective of circumstance.
Posted to the site on 1st July 2009
This article was extracted from The Mobile World Briefing, the weekly newsletter from The Mobile World.
To download a sample issue of the Briefing in PDF format, please click here.
For more information including full subscription pricing, please visit The Mobile World