Who are the Fastest Growing Operators in Asia-Pacific?
The ten fastest growing companies in the Asia Pacific region added a total of just over 65m new customers between them, or two thirds of the regional total and more than one third of the global total. This total compares with just 52m for the prior quarter. All ten added more than three million new connections and the 20 fastest growing businesses all added more than one million, this emphasising both the size of the market and its diversity.
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Leading MNOs by Net Additions
Seven of the companies on this list in Issue 125Ã's survey of the first quarter results feature again. China Mobile, inevitably, heads the list as it has done for the last few years. It gained 22.45m new customers in the quarter and if this didnÃ't quite match Q1Ã's 22.79m we should see the number in context: 22.45m is more than 14% above Q4 07Ã's 19.67m which was itself the third best quarter. Bharti remains in second place, but it did manage a new record with 7.4m net additions. In fact, each of BhartiÃ's last 13 quarters has set a new record. Third place is taken by Indosat, with 5.95m new connections to take its total to 32.4m. This is easily its best ever quarter, bettering the 2.5m from Q4 07 by more than 100% and allowing it to take more than two percentage points of market share.
Only one other company managed to add more than 5m new customers, though three others came close. Vodafone India was the fourth fastest growing business again this quarter, with a new record of 5.07m net adds, while Reliance just fell short of its previous best, with 4.99m. Viettel from Vietnam and XL from Indonesia both set new records with 4.84m and 4.50m respectively, these numbers comfortably bettering the 3.27m and 2.90m from Q4 07 and Q1 08 respectively. Two of the last three companies also enjoyed record quarters. The exception was China UnicomÃ's GSM business where its 3.37m fell some way short of the 4.64m seen in Q4 07. Vietnam Mobile, with 3.34m more than doubled its previous best, while IDEAÃ's 3.19m just bettered Q1Ã's 2.95m.
In all, seven of the top ten companies set new records in the quarter. This suggests a robustness at odds with the prevailing mode in Western economies.
Posted to the site on 2nd October 2008
This article was extracted from The Mobile World Briefing, the weekly newsletter from The Mobile World.
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