Mobile News

Overall growth in the western European mobile market has begun to slow, the region’s total customer base grew 57% in 2000, compared with 68% in 1999. At the same time, its prepaid market has doubled in size in 1999 and 2000. Prepaid users now make up 61% of the total mobile customers.

As most of the markets are now very mature, with very high penetration levels, we expect the operators to seek to improve ARPU, rather than simply adding more customers. Therefore, we expect to see the proportion of net adds that are prepaid dropping, from over 80% in 2003, to 70% and then 60% as the prepaid sector becomes mature and established and the operators strive for a stronger mix of prepaid and post-paid. We forecast that the prepaid market will level off from 2009 on at around 62% of the total base.

ARPU levels have been falling rapidly due to the mass-market uptake of services. However, once enhanced services are offered to all customers, including prepaid, the operators should reverse this trend. We forecast that ARPU, both overall and prepaid, will begin to rise again in 2010 and from that year onwards prepaid services will generate just under 40% of the total cellular revenues.