Optus gains mobile subscribers, Vodafone loses

Stuart Corner
Sunday, 12 February 2012 10:34

IT Industry - Market

Optus has managed to grow its mobile subscriber base despite Telstra's addition of a massive one million new services in the past six months, but Vodafone continues to lose customers.

Figures released by SingTel ahead of Monday's release of its Q3 results show that Optus added 182,000 new customers in the quarter to 31 December 2011. These took its total mobile customer numbers to 9.41 million, up five percent on a year ago.

Optus added 113,000 postpaid customers taking postpaids to 54 percent of the total base, up two percentage points from a year ago. Prepaid customers increased by 69,000. Optus said that prepaid sales had lifted and churn rates had improved.

The number of 3G customers grew to 6.24 million, an increase of five percent from a quarter ago. This included 1.55 million wireless broadband customers, 94,000 added in the three months to December.

Vodafone Hutchison Australia's figures were revealed in Vodafone Group's 3 results, released at the end of last week. (These show only 50 percent of actual numbers because VHA is a 50/50 joint venture).

The show VHA having 6.724 million customers at 31 December, down from 6.838 million six months ago. Vodafone said: "Despite improvements in the network and customer service in Australia, customer sentiment and a highly competitive market continued to adversely impact service revenue growth, which declined 11.1 percent in the quarter."

For Vodafone things were little better on the other side of the Tasman. There customer numbers fell from 2.458 million six months ago to 2.420 million. The company said: "In New Zealand service revenue growth was impacted by voice and SMS termination rate cuts and the uptake of more competitively priced tariffs."

Last week Telstra reported that it had added almost one million domestic mobile services during the half year, including 338,000 postpaid handheld and 436,000 mobile broadband services. They drove mobile revenue growth of 10.9 percent in the half to $4.39b, compared to a year earlier.

Number trouble
When we first posted this article we inadvertently gave the number of postpaid adds for Optus (113,000) as the total adds for the three months. An ever alert (it was Sunday) Optus exec pointed out the error, which we swiftly corrected. However we weren't the only ones having trouble with Optus mobile numbers. SingTel's press release issued on Sunday gave the total number correctly as 9.409 million and said: "The Group's total mobile customer base grew 13 percent or 50.7 million from a year ago to reach 434 million as at 31 December 2011."

However by the time that release was turned into an ASX announcement Optus mobile numbers had grown to 9.440 million and the total SingTel mobile customer base was up 50.8 percent. The incorrect Optus mobile subscriber total was swiftly amended, but SingTel had to then issue a second amendment to get the percentage growth figure back to 50.7 percent. We don't feel quite so bad now about our mistake :-).