Chinese Growth Dips As India Marches on
China, India, Pakistan, Japan and South Korea are amongst the largest markets in Asia and The Mobile World holds monthly data for all five. At the end of July, the five markets had a combined total of 1.122bn mobile customers, approximately 30% of the global total. Between them they added 140.6m new connections in the first seven months of 2008 alone, and 233.8m were added in the twelve months ending 31st July 2008.
China is the world’s largest market and it has more customers than the other four markets combined. At the end of July there were 591.60m mobile connections in China, and the 600m mark will almost certainly be reached by the end of Q3, if not by the end of August. Net additions stood at 7.64m in July, the lowest figure for 10 months although still 8.1% up on the July 2007 gain. With an average monthly gain of almost 9m in the first six months of 2008, something of a slowdown was perhaps inevitable – if an average of more than 10,000 new connections every hour in July counts as a slowdown. China Mobile was responsible for almost 93% of the month’s net additions, and this excellent performance saw its market share boosted to 71.0% from 69.4% at the end of 2007.
The Indian mobile base may be less than half that of China, but a strong monthly gain in July took its figure for year-to-date net additions above the Chinese figure. India added 61.95m in the first seven months of 2008 compared to 61.16m for China. To give some sense of the scale of these figures, the combined customer base of France and Switzerland at the end of Q2 08 was under 61m. India’s July gain of 9.19m was in itself bigger than the entire Swiss mobile market. It was also the second largest monthly gain ever seen in India on an organic basis, behind the 9.90m recorded in March. In total, there were 291.57m Indian mobile customers at the end of July. Bharti is the market leader in India with 72.08m customers, only just short of the 72.88m recorded by the world’s third largest network by customer numbers, AT&T, at the end of Q2 08. Bharti’s end-July market share of 24.7% was up 1.1pp year on year and was its highest figure for over five years.
Tags: 3G, China-Mobile, GSMPages: 1 2
