ISLAMABAD: The number of mobile phone-users in the country has reached 133.02 million till May this year as five mobile phone operators added a combined user base of 824,903 customers during the month.
The combined user base of mobile companies registered decline in May 2016 for first time since Bio-metric Verification System (BVS) introduced last year. Till April this year, the number of mobile phone users was 132.65 million, data issued by Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA) showed on Thursday.
Experts were of the opinion that this could be sign (for saturation) and despite the fact that negative growth in May 2016 could be due to data clean-up, telcos should get used to of seeing low sales figures during months to come.
This also calls for a strategic policy shift in how telcos generate revenue, i.e by relying more on data and less on voice.
Only substantial addition in revenues - for some operators came through mobile financial segment, but time has come for them to expand pipe and include services and value addition through data services to generate more money.
Back to customers data, Mobilink is still leading charts with 38.99 million customers while Telenor is closing in gap with 37.45 million subscribers.
It appears that Telenor would not get any chance to cross Mobilink as market leader is all set to grab Warid's 11 million customer to widen lead to a point where Telenor will lose hopes for becoming number one player for a decade at least.
Zong had 25.14 million customers at end of May 2016 while Ufone stood with 20.32 million customers till the time.
The data showed that the number of 3G/4G users in Pakistan reached 29.74 million by end of May 2016 as compared to 28.67 million in last month, showing a reasonable growth in modern mobile broadband services with each passing month.
The number of Zong, Mobilink, Ufone and Telenor reached 5,921,890, 9,261,146, 5,326,429 and 8,278,048 3G users respectively by May 2016.
The number of 4G (Zong) users jumped from 584,540 subscribers in April 2016 subscribers to 630,277 by May. Mobile teledensity increased from 69.05 percent to 69.34 percent and Broadband subscribers increased from 31,645,171 to 32,717,756 during the period under review.
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