Tariffs fall but how much competition is there in mobile markets?

London, 29th October 2002: As might be expected, the latest update of Tarificas European Mobile Tariff Benchmarks report for October 2002 shows a continuing downward cost trend year on year for mobile tariffs.

However, Tarificas research reveals that while tariffs continue to fall across Europe there is still significant grouping of pricing for operators within individual country markets. As such, where there are large discrepancies in pricing between individual countries, minimal price differences exist within the countries themselves.

To demonstrate this, we have taken a medium-usage post-pay customer and compared data for a typical usage pattern over a monthly period. Among the 81 operators surveyed we observe the following groupings:

         
Rank   Country   Network   Monthly bill US$
         
         
1   Turkey   Turkcell   17.79
2   Turkey   Telism   21.67
         
17   Austria   Tele.ring Mobil   42.79
19   Austria   Mobilkom   43.84
20   Austria   T-Mobil   44.33
27   Austria   One   47.56
         
42   Portugal   Telecel   54.63
44   Portugal   Optimus   54.95
45   Portugal   TMN   55.40
         
67   France   SFR   78.59
69   France   FT Mobiles   80.66
72   France   Bouygues Telecom   83.81

NOTES:
Basis of medium usage monthly basket: 300 minutes of usage per month / 50% of calls made at peak times / 50% of calls made at off-peak times
Call type split: 65% mobile to fixed calls / 15% On-net calls / 15% to other mobile networks / 5% international calls to adjacent country

On quick analysis we can see that for the same basket of charges operators in Austria charge twice the price of operators in Turkey, whilst operators in France charge almost twice the price of those in Austria.

Naturally there are those countries that buck the trend, for example Comliet in Lithuania rank 77th at $101.10 per month whereas it's national competitors Bite and Omnitel rank 31st and 33rd costing $49.29 and $49.96 respectively.

While we cannot discount the effects of varying tax, licence and underlying network costs between the countries surveyed it is difficult to ignore price differentials of a factor of 4-5 for the same service between European countries. With increasing cross border acquisition, whereby a number of telecoms operators have interests in mobile providers across a number of European countries, it may well prove to be the case that in the future we will see cross-European competition instead of competition being restricted to national markets.

Tarifica's European Mobile Tariff Benchmarks report covers 81 operators in 31 countries and includes tariffs for low, medium and high usage post pay users as well as pre pay users. For more information on this essential service for providers and users of mobile communications, contact us at info@tarifica.com, visit us at www.tarifica.com or call us at +44 (0) 20 7423 4500.

Tarifica @ PBI Media
3F, 19 Thomas More Street
London E1W 1YS
UNITED KINGDOM

NOTE TO EDITORS: Tarifica, the worlds leading specialists in telecommunications pricing and analysis, is a division of PBI Media, an international niche services consultancy in the telecommunications/communications and media space with offices in London, New Jersey and Washington DC.

The division, which was established in 1976 as the first consultancy to track telecommunications tariffs, offers a unique repertoire of tariff-related products and services covering fixed and mobile services in Europe, the Middle East, Africa, the Indian subcontinent, the Asia-Pacific Region and Latin America. More than one million tariffs from over 150 operators in 120 countries are constantly being updated by our multi-lingual specialist team, which collects data by primary research among the operators themselves.

Each year the company provides a programme of multi client studies, focused reports, seminars, custom in-house workshops, forecasts and a range of web based and electronic services to support client intelligence and decision making.