some news, page-9

Vodafone Group last week issued its quarterly results showing its proportionate share of the 50/50 Australian joint venture. These showed that VHA had 6.818 million mobile subscribers at 31 December 2009, up from 6.548 million at 31 October.

45.9 percent of subscribers at 31 December were prepaid. Vodafone said that the joint venture was "delivering cost synergies in line with management's expectations," but gave no other information about the Australian business.

At 30 June 2009 VHA had 6.31 million subscribers, 80 percent the number of customers at number two player Optus. Current numbers show VHA at 82.3 percent of Optus numbers.

Optus however has culled some dead wood in the past quarter. According to SingTel's press release, "During the quarter, Optus tightened its churn policy for customers who remained inactive after various recharge campaigns, and deactivated 272,000 prepaid customers. This resulted in a decline of 145,000 Optus prepaid customers this quarter with total prepaid customers of 4.2 million as at 31 December 2009."

This puts the Optus prepaid customer base at 51 percent, slightly larger as a percentage of the total than VHA's 45.9 percent.

SingTel said that customer growth had been achieved through "Optus' compelling propositions including refreshed wireless broadband plans, smartphone plans, unique content and applications and industry-leading 'Timeless' plans."

In the quarter, the number of 3G customers increased to 3.34 million, an 8.7 percent increase from a quarter ago.

However more important that raw customer numbers is average revenue per user. This information will be revealed by Optus later today when its Q3 results are released. VHA data should be available later this month because shareholder Hutchison Telecom Australia remains a listed entity on the Australian Stock Exchange. Telstra will announce its half year results on Thursday 11 February.

In the past SingTel has released its mobile subscriber data to the ASX the day before release of its quarterly results. It failed to do so this time.

Last September, market research firm Telsyte claimed that VHA had overtaken Optus in 3G customer numbers, had the highest monthly per customer revenue of any of the three operators and was neck-and-neck with Optus on overall mobile revenues. Telsyte put VHA ARPU for the six months to June 2009 at $47.50, ahead of Telstra at $45.60.

Tags: Stuart Corner, Telstra, Optus, VHA, Telyste