The half year results from both France Telecom and Telefonica Group are in. We’ve dug into the full reports and pulled out some comparisons for you around customer numbers, data, voice and total ARPUs, on a country by country basis.
What do they show us? Well, they show that although there are a whole host of good indicators across both operators’ business, both operators are seeing overall revenue decline in key European markets.
The contract base is growing, traffic is increasing, data ARPU is growing, but voice ARPU continues to decline across all markets, although there was a slight slowing in the rate of decline from the first to second quarter in many reported markets. This voice decline clearly impacted on overall revenues, which also declined in many markets.
This is the landscape the major operators face, and it shows that although many think the app opportunity is over-hyped, growing data revenues is critical to mobile operators, given that voice revenues appear to be in long term decline. However, it is clear that there are other ways to grow data revenues aside from chasing the app stores.
One example is O2 Germany, where overall revenues were up year on year. Interestingly O2 ascribed this to non-P2P SMS revenues – which it said were up 34% and now account for a whopping 41% of total mobile data revenues. Mobile data revenues themselves now accound to 32% of all O2 Germany’s service revenues.
Another, less positive, exception is the Czech Republic, where data revenues declined alongside voice revenues. O2 attributed this to an increased adoption of mobile broadband packages – truly here’s an insight in the data revenue gap whereby operators cannot realise the financial value of increasing sales of flat rate data packages.
Some like-for-like numbers follow. See how Orange and O2 have performed in your market.
Total Numbers:
FT now has 123.1 million mobile customers, a year on year growth of 6.6%, and 182 million customers in total. The highest level of recent growth in mobile customers has come in Africa and the Middle East, where customer numbers have risen 18% in the past six months.
O2 has 45 million mobile customers, up 6.1% from this time last year – a very similar rise to FT’s. O2 has 48% of its customers on contract, and its contract base grew 10% year on year.
Selected Countries – O2
UK:
Total customers up 4.5% year on year to reach 21.6 million.
Contract customers up 11% year on year.
Net additions in total were 306,000 with bulk of those (250,000) coming in the second quarter.
Traffic increased 9.2% to 28.5 billion minutes.
Total ARPU declined 3% to €24.6 billion. Voice ARPU continued to decline, but at a slightly slower rate from the first (-9%) to second quarter(-8.5%). Data ARPU grew 6.9% year on year.
Germany:
Total customers – 16.3 million, up 9% on June 30 2010.
Contract customer base up 9.8%.
Net adds of 765,000, with 407,000 in the second quarter.
Total ARPU was €14.8. Voice ARPU declined -6.2% to €9.9. Data ARPU rose 4.8% in the first half of the year to €4.9.
Organic revenues grew 8% year on year.
Ireland:
1.7 million customers, down 0.3% year on year.
Contract customer base up 7.6%
Traffic increased 0.8%.
Total ARPU declined 6.1% (including MTR cuts). Voice ARPU droppd 9.7%, with data ARPU rising 2.3%.
Total revenues declined 6.9% to €419 million.
Czech Republic:
Total mobile customer base of 4.8 million, up 0.1%
70,000 net losses in the pre-pay customer base, 113,000 net adds to the contract base.
Total ARPU declined 9.5% (including MTR cuts). Voice ARPU dropped 10%. Data ARPU declined 8% in the first half.
Total revenues declined 6.5% year on year.
Selected countries – FT Orange
France:
Mobile revenues declined 1.2% to €5.13 billion in the first half of 2010.
Contract customers rose 5.6%.
Data revenues rose 21.8%
Data now accounts for 29.9% of mobile service revenues.
Spain:
First half mobile revenues fell 2.3%
Contract customers grew 5.1%
Total mobile customers: 6.8 million
No figures given on data or voice revenues. Data revenues were reported to have grown by an unspecified amount.
Poland:
Overall mobile revenues 4.7%
Contract customers up 5.3%, representing 48.4% of the customer base
Total customers 14 million.
Rest of Europe:
Switzerland: Revenues up 3.1%
Belgium: Revenues up 6.3%
Romania: Revenues down 8.7%.