VHA close to being Australia's number two mobile operator

Stuart Corner
Monday, 14 September 2009 10:31

IT Industry - Strategy

VHA, the mobile operator formed from the merger of Vodafone Australia and Hutchison Australia, has overtaken Optus in 3G customer numbers, has the highest monthly per customer revenue of any of the three operators and is neck-and-neck with Optus on overall revenues, according to market researcher, Telsyte.

Telsyte put VHA ARPU for the six months to June 2009 at $47.50, ahead of Telstra at $45.60. Telsyte analyst Gary Tsang told iTWire that VHA's market leading ARPU was largely the result of a focus on postpaid subscribers, in contrast to Telstra, which has grown its prepaid subscriber base significantly in recent months.

However, Telsyte said that all players, including MVNOs as a group, experienced a year-on-year ARPU rise, thanks to Australians' growing love affair with non-voice services, which now make up well over one-third of their mobile bills.

"Telstra's prepaid subscriber base was up 8.9 percent in the six months to June and now accounts for 35 percent of total," Tsang said. Also contributing to VHA's ARPU lead was the relative low percentage of 2G customers (Hutchison brought only 3G to the joint venture) that generally have lower ARPU than 3G. "Also, Hutchison never had a strong focus on prepaid," Tsang said, adding: "VHA has actually lost numbers in the past six months. They changed reporting after the merger and took out a lot of inactive users that Vodafone used to report. "

Vodafone switched from pushing prepaid to post paid around the end of 2005. Vodafone's head of corporate communications, Greg Spears, told iTWire at the time that the company had done this because. "People really like those zero dollar handsets, and the only way we can offer those is on contract."

Telsyte says its research found a market little impacted by the recession. Warren Chaisatien, Telsyte research director, said: "The market continued to show no sign of abating, with one million new mobile users added, taking the total number to 24.5 million or 113 percent of the population. Mobile broadband, the rapid migration of 2G to 3G, and the Apple iPhone were notable contributors that drove half-year service revenue to enjoy double-digit annual growth."

Tsang said the over 100 percent penetration was the result of people having USB dongles for broadband in addition to their cellphone and, increasingly, machine-to-machine communications. "As mobile commerce takes off there will be a lot more machine-to-machine, we are seeing it start to take off but that is jut the tip of the iceberg."

With the Australian and global economies starting to show signs of recovering, Telsyte is forecasting that the local mobile market will remain very strong. It estimates the number of mobile users will reach 25.3 million by the end of 2009, 116 percent penetration, and 30 million, 129 percent penetration in 2013.

Service revenue, meanwhile, is projected to grow at an average annual rate of 6.4 percent to reach $16.8 billion in the next four years, with non-voice revenue exceeding voice revenue as early as 2011.