Connected Research

This continues to be one of the most enduring posts on this blog, but it is now a little out of date. You can find the full original post below, but you might like to know that I have also updated the figures in a slightly different context than the T-Mobile/Orange JV, and re-located them in a couple of posts on a separate blog which you can find at:

http://sameoldplayedoutscenes.wordpress.com/2011/01/22/tesco-mobile-reaches-2-5m/

or (slightly earlier) here:

http://sameoldplayedoutscenes.wordpress.com/2010/09/01/mobile-market-share-2010/

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And the original post commences here:

Yesterday’s press release by France Telecom and Deutsche Telekom about the approval for the merger of their UK subsidiaries highlighted an interesting snippet of information concerning the JV: that it would serve 29.5m customers.

On the presumption that this is the existing customer base of the merged JV, how does this relate to market share? We have been repeatedly told that the market share of Orange and T-Mobile in the UK is 37% – thus indicating a total mobile customer base in the UK of just less than 80 million. This is, more or less, in touch with Ofcom’s estimate that there are 126.1 active mobile connections per 100 population (Figure 4.1), given a UK population of 61m. That would indicate about 77.4m mobile subscriptions (and, indeed, a market share for T-Orange of about 38%).

The most recent Ofcom quarterly figures, published last month for Q3 2009, are, however, likely to provide a more accurate and reliable figure. These show a total subscriber base for the big 4 (i.e. excluding 3 UK) of 69.2m (Mobile telecoms market data, Table 4). We’d probably now need to add about 5.2m for 3 UK, on the basis of it at least matching its 2008 growth rate in 2009 (Figure 4.42). These figures exclude the customers of mobile virtual network operators (such as Tesco Mobile, which uses O2) for Vodafone, O2 and Orange (but presumably, therefore, they include those for Virgin Mobile in the T-Mobile stats). According to the most recent quarterly accounts for Virgin Media (Customer Segment>mobile), Virgin Mobile has around 3.232m customers. Taking these off the Ofcom numbers, to give a comparable figure for all the operators based on direct subscriptions rather than those encompassing virtual operators, gives the following indicative market shares, by number of subscribers:

Interestingly, the number of T-Mobile and Orange customers on this basis totals exactly the figure in the companies’ press release – 29.5m. Yet, the market share on this basis is not 37% – but 42%. Including Virgin Mobile subscribers in the T-Orange total, and adding a Tesco Mobile subscriber base of 2m (Retailing Services>Tesco telecoms), the market share of those on the T-Orange network climbs a little, to about 43%. This excludes virtual operators on the Orange and the Vodafone networks, but these are likely to have only a small market share (and, in Orange’s case, would further concentrate the numbers). Not really within an acceptable margin of error, that.

Now that the merger has been approved, these are figures that will need to be closely monitored in order to examine the effectiveness of the ‘remedies’ that address the competition aspects of the JV. Nevertheless, there would appear to be little urgency for this – the merger may proceed ‘by the spring’, but the auction of additional spectrum in the 1800MHz band which has been made a condition of approval for the JV need not take place until the end of 2011 while the spectrum itself does not have to be cleared for use by the winners in that process until 2013 in one case and 2015 in the other. In order to show a bit of good faith, given the fast track approval the JV has received, the parent companies might want to look at facilitating an earlier release than that.