KPN lead on Dutch mobile market erodes in 2019 as T-Mobile, Vodafone take customers

Nieuws Mobiel Nederland 21 FEB 2020
KPN lead on Dutch mobile market erodes in 2019 as T-Mobile, Vodafone take customers
T-Mobile was the main winner on the Dutch mobile market in Q4 and 2019. The operator grew both organically and through the takeover of Tele2 at the start of the year, to become the second-largest operator in terms of customers. Vodafone fell to third place but still increased its customer numbers, while market leader KPN saw its retail customer base shrink by nearly 5 percent over the year, research by Telecompaper shows.

T-Mobile added nearly 1.6 million retail customers in 2019, including 1.3 million acquired with Tele2, to reach a total of 5.6 million at year-end. The growth was entirely in postpaid, including in Q4, when it added 83,000 postpaid subscribers. Its new fixed-mobile offer ‘Uit en Thuis’ likely gave a boost to quarterly subscriber growth and helped take the company to over 92 percent of retail customers on postpaid.

Vodafone also fared well in the postpaid market, adding 76,000 subscribers in Q4 and 269,000 over the full year. Its postpaid base was up 6.4 percent year-on-year to nearly 4.5 million at year-end, supported also by its fixed-mobile offers with Ziggo as well as growth in the business market. Postpaid made up 88.5 percent of Vodafone’s retail customer base at year-end.

KPN is the only operator with a significant prepaid business still. In line with an overall contraction in the prepaid segment, KPN’s retail prepaid base shrunk by almost 21 percent in 2019 to just under 1.1 million customers, or nearly 17 percent of its retail business. Not all of these lost Sims were converted to postpaid, as KPN also shed 42,000 postpaid retail subscribers last year. In total, its retail base fell 4.8 percent in 2019 to 6.5 million customers.

"KPN’s efforts to focus more on the high-value parts of the mobile market are having limited success," said Alejandra van de Roer, Telecompaper’s senior research analyst for the mobile market. "It withdrew from the low end of the market with the discontinuation of the Telfort brand in 2019, but has yet to accelerate growth at the main KPN brand. This will be a challenge in 2020 as competition from T-Mobile and VodafoneZiggo remains intense."

The above figures are based on Telecompaper’s Dutch Mobile Operators Q4 2019 report, which will be published in March. The quarterly report provides a full analysis of all the KPIs and trends on the mobile market, including a five-year revenue forecast. To order a copy of the latest edition of the report or receive a customised market analysis, please contact research@telecompaper.com. 

Categories:

Mobiel

Companies:

KPN,  T-Mobile Netherlands,  Vodafone Netherlands

Countries:

Nederland

Tags:

Voice services, Market research

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