China's 3G Users Rise Threefold

China had almost 39 million 3G users by the end of October, a threefold increase year-on-year, according to figures from the country’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) cited in a Xinhua report.

China Mobile had 16.98 million 3G connections as of October 31, while China Unicom had 11.66 million 3G users. China Telecom, the country’s third largest operator, doesn't disclose its 3G user numbers every month but has said it had 9.15 million 3G users at the end of September. source: Mobile Business Briefing

Ovi Up to 3 Million Downloads a Day

Nokia said that its Ovi Store is now generating 3 million downloads and attracting more than 250,000 new consumers every day. The handset maker said that more than 400,000 new developers have joined Forum Nokia in the past 12 months and that there have been 1.5 million downloads of either the Nokia Qt Software Development Toolkit (SDK) or the Qt SDK. source: Nokia statement

BT Continues to Shrink

London-based telco BT said that its underlying revenue fell 3% year-on-year in the quarter ending September 30 to 4.98 billion pounds (8.04 billion US dollars), as revenue in its Global Services division declined 2% and revenue in its retail division fell 4%, dragged down by a 6% slump in consumer revenues. Revenues in BT's wholesale divison were down 5%, partly because of a regulatory charge.
 
BT said that its fibre network now passes three million premises and it is getting 4,000 orders a week for its fibre-based broadband service, BT Infinity, to which it has now connected 38,000 customers. BT also claimed half a million customers for its BT Vision, television service. source: BT presentation

Growth Accelerates for Telefonica

Pan-Europe and Latin-America telco Telefonica said its revenues rose 2.5% year-on-year on an organic basis in the first nine months of 2010 to 44.28 billion euros, compared with a rise of 2% in the first six months and just 0.9% in the first quarter.

Telefonica said that its Latin American operations contributed 2.7 pecentage points of the organic growth and its European operations, excluding Spain, contributed 0.9 percentage points, offset by a negative contribution of 1.4 percentage points from Telefonica Espana. The Madrid-based group said that its revenues from mobile data services rose 21% year-on-year in the first nine months of 2010 and now account for 26% of mobile service revenues. source: Telefonica presentation

Bharti Airtel Grows Bigger

India's largest mobile operator Bharti Airtel said  its revenues in South Asia rose 9.2% year-on-year in the quarter ending September 30 to 113.31 billion Indian rupees (2.56 billion US dollars), while its newly-acquired African operations generated 38.91 billion rupees in the quarter.

Bharti's customers in South Asia climbed 32% year-on-year to almost 148 million at the end of September, while the voice minutes on its networks in the region rose 36% year-on-year. But Bharti's average revenue-per-minute in India fell 21% year-on-year to 44.4 Indian paisas (1 US cent). Bharti said its average revenue-per-minute in Africa was 6.6 US cents in the quarter, down 9% quarter-on-quarter. source: Bharti Airtel statement 

Vodafone Aims for Annual Growth of up to 4%

Fuelled by a strong performance by its Asia-Pacific and Middle East operations, Vodafone said its organic service revenue rose 2.3% year-on-year in the quarter ending September 30. For the six months ending September 30, organic service revenue grew 1.7% to 21.23 billion British pounds (34 billion US dollars).

Going forward, Vodafone said it plans to focus on Europe, Africa and India, where it will exploit the "mobile data growth opportunity", pursue selective expansion in the enterprise market and growth opportunities in the machine-to-machine and financial services sectors. In Europe, it plans to continue its "capital efficient approach."

Vodafone said that "the execution of the updated strategy is targeted to achieve annual growth in organic service revenue of between 1% and 4% in the period to 31 March 2014. Over the same period we expect that EBITDA margins will stabilise, as we benefit from continued cost efficiency, regional scale and improving margins in a number of markets including India." source: Vodafone statement


 

China Telecom Leans on Mobile

China Telecom reported a 6.2% year-on-year rise in operating revenues in the third quarter to 55.73 billion Chinese yuan (8.33 billion US dollars), as its broadband customers rose 19% to 61 million and its mobile subscribers climbed 77% to 83 million (including 9.15 million 3G customers).

However, China Telecom's active wirelines fell from 194.4 million at the end of the third quarter of 2009 to 178.3 million as of September 30. source: China Telecom statistics

Domestic Mobile Drags Down Telecom Italia

Telecom Italia said its revenues fell 4.4% year-on-year on an organic basis in the third quarter to 6.68 billion euros, as the revenues of TIM (its domestic mobile business) sank 12.4%. Telecom Italia said: "The new marketing strategy introduced in Q4 2009 intended to make rates more competitive and to stimulate in particular traffic within the TIM client community have not yet produced an upturn in volumes sufficient to compensate for the lower prices." The decline in domestic revenues was partly compensated for by a 6.1% rise in organic revenues in Brazil. source: Telecom Italia statement

MTN Sees Subs Climb 4%

African and Middle East mobile operator group MTN said its subscribers increased by 4% in the third quarter to 134.47 million on September 30 compared with 129.21 million on June 30. MTN added that average revenue per a user (ARPU) remained relatively stable in local currency in the quarter compared to June 2010. The exceptions were a 7% fall in year-to-date ARPU in Rwanda, a 6% fall in Bissau and a 5% rise in Sudan. source: MTN statement

Wireless Gains Lift Alcatel-Lucent

Telecoms networks supplier Alcatel-Lucent reported 10.5% year-on-year growth in revenues to 4.07 billion euros in the third quarter of 2010, fuelled by a 24% increase in sales of wireless equipment to 1.07 billion euros and favourable currency movements. Services revenue climbed 9% to 948 million euros.

In local currencies, revenue climbed 11% year-on-year in North America, 7% in Asia and was flat in Europe. Alcatel-Lucent said its sales of WCDMA equipment rose 33% year-on-year and claimed its share of the wireless networks market rose to 16.2% in the second quarter from 13.6% in the second quarter of 2009. It said it has seven contracts to supply LTE equipment. source: Alcatel-Lucent presentation.

Qualcomm Sees Growth Accelerate

Handset chip supplier Qualcomm said it expects its revenues in the quarter ending December 26th to rise between 14% and 25% year-on-year to between 3.05 billion and 3.35 billion US dollars. It also forecast that its revenues in the year ending September 26th, 2011 will climb to between 12.4 billion and 13 billion dollars compared with 10.98 billion dollars in the prior year.

Qualcomm's revenues in the quarter ending September 26th grew 10% year-on-year to 2.95 billion US dollars as its MSM (mobile station modem) shipments climbed 22% to 111 million. source: Qualcomm presentation 

Facebook Claims 200 Million Mobile Users

Facebook said there are more than 200 million active users currently accessing Facebook through their mobile devices and these people are twice as active on Facebook as non-mobile users.

There are more than 200 mobile operators in 60 countries working to deploy and promote Facebook mobile products, the company added. source: Facebook web site 

Fixed-Line Drags Down Deutsche Telekom

Deutsche Telekom's total revenue fell  2.1% year-on-year on a like-for-like basis in the third quarter of 2010 to 15.6 billion euros. Telecoms revenue in Germany fell by 2.4% year-on-year to 6.3 billion euros in the third quarter despite a 2.3% increase in revenues from its mobile communications business to 2.2 billion euros. Excluding the "one-time effect from the expiration of the national roaming agreement with O₂ at the end of 2009," dometic mobile revenues grew by 6.4 percent fuelled by fast growth in mobile data revenue, Deutsche Telekom said. Smartphones accounted for 53% of all handsets sold by T-Mobile Germany in the third quarter. Fixed-line sales declined 4.3% year-on-year.

T-Mobile USA's  revenue in the third quarter slipped 0.5% year-on-year to 5.4 billion U.S. dollars. In Deutsche Telekom's European operations (excluding Germany), total revenue declined by 19.5% to 4.1 billion euros compared with the third quarter of 2009. After elimination of T-Mobile UK's contribution, total revenue fell just 3.6%, Deutsche Telekom said. source: Deutsche Telekom statement

ZTE's Sales Slow Sharply

ZTE said last week that its total operating revenue rose just 1.3% year-on-year in the third quarter to 15.34 billion Chinese yuan (2.29 billion US dollars). In the first nine months of 2010, the Chinese telecoms equipment company's revenue grew 7.5%.

For the first nine months, ZTE reported a year-on-year decline of 2.6% in its revenue from the sales of carriers’ networks, as a decrease in revenue from wireless products was partly offset by an increase in revenue from wireline products. ZTE said revenue from devices grew year-on-year by 30.5%, fuelled by strong demand for 3G handsets and data card products. source: ZTE statement

iPhone Helps SoftBank Ride High

SoftBank last week reported a 12% year-on-year increase in sales to 764 billion Japanese yen (9.48 billion US dollars) in the quarter ending September 30. Aided by strong demand for the iPhone, which SoftBank has exclusively, the Japanese company said its mobile communications business added 901,000 new customers in the quarter compared with 360,700 in the same quarter in 2009.

Aiming to double its mobile base stations to 120,000, SoftBank plans to spend 400 billion yen on capex in the year to the end of March 2011 compared with 222.9 billion yen the previous year. SoftBank said that 54,000 customers had applied for femtocells by September 2010. source: SoftBank statements and presentations

Acquisitions Shore Up Sprint

Last week, Sprint reported a 1% year-on-year increase in revenues to 8.15 billion US dollars in the quarter ending September 30th thanks to "fourth quarter 2009 acquisitions (Virgin Mobile), equipment revenues, and prepaid Boost service revenues, partially offset by lower postpaid wireless service revenues and wireline revenues."

Sprint said capital expenditures were 462 million dollars in the quarter, compared to 431 million dollars in the third quarter of 2009. Sprint said it launched its WiMax service in 19 new cities during the quarter, including Boston, Orlando and Nashville, so it now covers 55 markets. Sprint said it expects WiMax coverage to reach up to 120 million people by the end of 2010, including a deployment in New York on Nov. 1. In December, Sprint plans to launch WiMAx services in Los Angeles, Miami and San Francisco, among others.source: Sprint statement