Telecompaper

Singapore Telecommunications (SingTel) saw its combined regional mobile customer base rise to 285 million at end-2009, an increase of 23 percent, or 52 million, from a year ago. Bharti (India) added 8.4 million mobile customers in the quarter, up from 8.1 million a quarter ago. Its mobile customer base grew to 118.9 million. Indonesian operator Telkomsel saw its mobile customer base grow by 25 percent, or 16.3 million from a year ago, to 81.6 million. Following two quarters of negative net additions as it churned out lower quality prepaid customers, Globe (Philippines) added 117,000 customers in the quarter. Globe had 23.2 million mobile customers at 31 December 2009, down 5.9 percent or 1.5 million, from a year ago. In Thailand AIS grew its mobile base to 28.8 million, up by 4.7 percent or 1.3 million. Warid (Bangladesh) grew its customer base by 11 percent, or 1.9 million, to 18.8 million, and PBTL (Bangladesh) gained 7.7 percent, or 139,000 more mobile customers, bringing its total customer base to 1.9 million. In Australia Optus added 164,000 postpaid customers, resulting in the postpaid customer base exceeding 4 million. 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 with total prepaid customers of 4.2 million at the end of the year. The number of 3G customers increased to 3.34 million, an 8.7 percent increase from a quarter ago. In its home market SingTel gained 81,000 new customers in the quarter, bringing its total mobile customer base to 3.2 million, an increase of 8.1 percent from a year ago. The operator added 36,000 new postpaid customers, up from 30,000 in the previous quarter. SingTel gained 45,000 prepaid customers. SingTel's total 3G mobile customer base grew steadily by 65,000 in the quarter to 1.41 million.