Country’s teledensity intact at 62pc

Friday, December 18, 2009
By our correspondent

KARACHI: The Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA), in the recently released data for October, says overall teledensity of the country kept almost intact at 62.4 per cent for the month. Penetration of all sub-segments of the industry including cellular, landline and wireless local loop also stayed muted at 58.6 per cent, 3.8 per cent and 1.6 per cent respectively.

During the month, the lukewarm growth trend further strengthened in the cellular segment with monthly net additions at just 10,000 taking the total to 95.9 million subscribers.

Subscriber additions during October 2009 were 114,000 lower than the addition in September 2009. Overall, the industry’s moderate subscriber additions are primarily attributable to the PTA’s recently launched unregistered/illegal SIMs blockage campaign.

According to telecom analysts, it is expected that subscriber additions in the segment are likely to remain dismal during the next a few months due to this factor.

As far as individual player level performance is concerned, Ufone was the worst performer of the month by losing almost 775,000 subscriber during the months. On top level, the additions for the industry stood at 785,000 subscribers.

However, a steep decline in Ufone’s subscriber base just mitigated the overall impact of addition on net basis.

Other than this, on subscribers basis, Ufone also lost its position as the third largest cellular company of the country.

Mobilink remained the market leader with 30.2 million (32 per cent) subscribers while the second position was held by Telenor with 22.0 million (23 per cent) subscribers. While, third position is narrowly shared by Warid and Ufone with 19 per cent market share for each.

However, Warid’s base is almost 254,000 higher than that of Ufone. Interestingly, on year to date basis, Mobilink has added 725,000 new subscribers (highest on net basis) while Ufone lost almost 1.7 million subscribers (lowest on net basis) during FY10. According to the data, WLL players attracted approximately 32,000 subscribers during October 2009 with their subscriber base expanding to 2.7 million growth of 4 per cent over end-June 2009 (FY09) level.

Furthermore, on monthly basis, the subscriber addition also remained higher than the September’s addition of 16,000 subscribers. For the month, Wateen attracted the highest subscribers at 16,000 or 4,000 higher additions than that of September 2009.