Telecom News Bulletin

The Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA) has released the latest telecom subscriber numbers for the month of January 2010. As per the released data, overall a huge net decline of 2.4 million subscriber. Cellular segment witnessed the highest monthly decline in the draining of 2.2 million subscribers.

WLL segment also continued to show declining trend in its subscriber base for the second consecutive month. Consequently, overall teledensity level of the country squeezed-out by almost 1.6 pps to 61.9 percent from its Dec 2009 level.

During January 2010, the cellular segment witnessed the highest ever monthly decline at 2,170k since 2004. Quite interestingly, Warid Telecom, whose subscriber stood at 16.2 million subscribers almost 2.65 million lower subscribers than last month’s level, solely contributes to this monthly decline.

This decline might be attributable to the company’s policy shift in the definition of its active subscriber status. Additionally, this could also be the impact of PTA’s efforts to curb the registration of illegal SIMs as well as blockage of already activated but unregistered SIMs.

On segregated basis, Mobilink remained the market leader with 31.1 million i.e.33 percent of market share, Telenor secured the second position with a market share of 24 percent. Ufone secured the third position that previously it shared with Warid. Ufone’s market share stood at 19 percent with net additions for the month at 67,000.

TCL witnessed a decline of 53,000 in subscribers to 1.2 million exactly the same level that was in June 2008.

On market share basis, PTCL still remains the market leader in the segment with 46 percent market share while this position is closely succeeded by Telecard and Worldcall with almost 25 percent and 23 percent market share, respectively.