Brazil's largest mobile phone operator Vivo Participações ended the first quarter this year with 360,000 GSM clients, company president Roberto Lima told an earnings conference call.
Of the amount, 90% were new clients and the remainder existing ones that migrated from Vivo's CDMA platform.
New GSM clients accounted for 16% of all the new clients over the quarter.
Vivo, which previously offered only CDMA handsets, started its migration to GSM in January for prepaid customers and in March for postpaid customers.
Vivo, a joint venture between Spain's Telefónica and Portugal Telecom, said that 80% of GSM clients were prepaid and the remainder postpaid, but that the strategy was to strike a better overall mix.
The company does not see the necessity of subsidizing handsets to acquire new GSM customers, because 40% of its gross adds in the quarter were secured via its own 303 stores.
"The GSM strategy is moving ahead as 16% of the total sales increase corresponds to GSM technology according to management... GSM is now available in 86% of the municipalities covered by CDMA," analyst Jose Luis Ramirez Domene at Deutsche Bank Equity Research said in a research note.
Vivo will invest 900mn reais (US$445mn) to boost the capacity of its GSM network this year, Lima said.
The operator invested 1.08bn reais to implement the GSM network."
Posted to the site on 11th May 2007
Posted to: www.cellular-news.com/story/23703.php