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Italy Reports Largest Quarterly Loss Ever Seen
The Italian market saw its second successive quarterly decline in Q1 09, the drop of 0.32m connections representing the largest ever seen in Italy. The total annual decline stood at 0.47m, or 0.5% on a proportionate basis. At the end of the quarter the total customer base was 88.33m. The penetration rate stood at just under 152%, down from 152.7% a year earlier.
Market leader TIM saw its fifth successive quarterly decline with a loss of 0.63m, its largest yet. This took its customer base to 34.16m, down 1.77m year on year and more than 2m lower than the Q4 07 high of 36.33m. On a proportionate basis, there was a 4.9% loss. The silver lining to this cloud was that the losses were confined to the prepaid base, which resulted in an improvement in customer quality, from 15.5% contract at the end of Q1 08 to 17.8% a year later.
Second-placed Vodafone also lost customers, thereby spurning an opportunity to make significant inroads into TIM's lead. It did close the gap slightly, however, its loss of 0.23m taking its total to 29.80m, 4.37m behind TIM compared to 5.93m a year earlier. This was Vodafone's second successive quarterly loss, and the annual decline stood at 0.20m. As with TIM, though, it was the prepaid base alone which lost customers, leaving the proportion of the base on contracts up 2.7pp year on year at 12.2%.
WIND, Italy's third largest mobile operator, saw the greatest gain in the quarter with a boost of 0.34m, and at the end of Q1 09 it had 18.42m customers. It thereby increased its market share by 1.8pp annually to 20.9%; this gain equalled the loss suffered by TIM, which finished Q1 09 on 38.7%. Vodafone was down 0.1pp to 33.7%, while H3G was up 0.1pp to 6.7%. It finished the quarter on 5.95m connections, up 0.21m.
While TIM and Vodafone have both performed poorly in terms of customer growth, both saw largely stable ARPU figures. TIM was down just €0.10 annually to €19.10, while Vodafone remained flat on €20.80.
Posted to the site on 20th July 2009
This article was extracted from The Mobile World Briefing, the weekly newsletter from The Mobile World.
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