Annual figures out from French regulator Arcep show a very clear picture that while consumer electronics is down in this recession, and handset vendors are suffering, operators themselves are thriving ‘ or at least were thriving right up until these figures cut off ‘ at the end of September 2008.
The entire telecommunications industry in France was up 2.4% in revenue terms over the previous year, to around €10.1 billion not counting income from value added services such as directories, advertising, hosting and call centre management.
In fixed telephony including fixed internet access, Arcep reported that the number of services being delivered was 40.2 million, also up 2.4% with a big drift from older style POTS telephony to DSL and IP telephony services. VoIP was up 38.1% as traditional fixed line telephony fell by 9.4% to 26.7 million. Voice over broadband subscriptions now account for 13.5 million fixed telephony services, around a third of the total. However the regulator noted that this growth is slowing and net additions were only 700,000 in 3Q08, compared to a million net additions in each of the previous three quarters. By now it may have ground to a halt as mobile takes over fixed lines, as has been witnessed in other parts of the world.
Homes connected to the internet reached 18.3 million up 2.4 million lines or 15.9%. Once again this was lower when compared to the 3 million additions the previous year. Internet income rose 16.9% over the previous year to €1.3 billion on the quarter. Unlike other countries in Europe where broadband ARPU is falling, in France it is stable, at €24 per month where it has been for two years.
France leads IPTV services globally with 5.6 million IPTV homes by the end of September 2008. This is often misreported due to the fact that Free offers IPTV for free with its broadband lines, and so although Free clearly has the most subscribers, France Telecom’s Orange service is cited as the biggest, simply because it is a bigger Pay TV operation. Some 1.6 million IPTV customers were added, making 39% growth during the year. IPTV penetration is now 34.6% out of the country’s 16.2 million ADSL lines, up from 28.8% the previous year. France Telecom’s Orange TV service now has 1.5 million IPTV customers as of end of third quarter 2008 and Cegetel’s rival ‘neuf TV’ has 850,000, which leaves an awful lot unaccounted for, until you add well over 2 million Free customers.
In a brand new wireless report out this week Arcep said France had some 58 million mobile subscribers of one sort or another, around 39 million on post paid contracts and nearly 19 million on pre-pay deals (see table in pdf version).
The last quarter shows post paid up 2.6% and pre-paid up 3.7% he compared to the immediate past quarter, but when compared to the a year ago quarter post paid is up 8.1% and pre-paid has fallen 1.2%. Hardly figures that point to a recession with net adds in the last quarter are up, but not as far up as the three previous quarters.
In the meantime SMS traffic continues to spike up 96% over last year, with the average person sending 69 texts a month.
The last graph (see pdf version) shows that like the US, France is gradually heading towards the 100% club, currently at 90%, when everyone in the country has at least one mobile handset. Many other parts of Europe are already there.