The quarterly movement in French mobile connections ground to a halt in the three months to June, and the year-on-year growth rate slowed to 2.0 percent after climbing to 2.6 percent in the March quarter, according to Arcep's latest statistics. Both consumer prepaid and postpaid connections were impacted, whereas year-on-year growth in B2B subscriptions improved to 3.5 percent. Meanwhile, the M2M market continued to progress at a steady, albeit slower pace, up 21 percent on June 2017 to reach 16.56 million connections (+876,000 quarterly net additions).
The consumer prepaid base continued to fall, with a net loss of 353,000 since March in mainland France. This was only partly offset by 281,000 net additions in the postpaid segment, sharply down on Q1 2018 (+612,000) and on Q2 2017 (+450,000). As a result, the consumer market declined by over 70,000 in the quarter to reach 63.81 million.
MVNOs bore the brunt of this downturn, losing 108,000 consumer connections across prepaid and postpaid customers since March, bringing the total to 7.55 million. This compares with 35,000 net additions achieved by the four MNOs in the consumer market. The combined MVNO share declined fractionally since the previous quarter to 11.8 percent of consumer connections, while remaining higher than the 11.6 percent share achieved in Q2 2017.
