Mobile internet, broadband usage to put significant impact on telecom revenues

ISLAMABAD: The annual revenues of telecom sector have reached around Rs. 449.6 billion during 2015, showing a bit decline as compared to last year.

The sector registered annual revenues of Rs. 463.5 last year while these were Rs. 439.5 billion in 2013-14, Rs. 409.2 billion in 2011-12 and Rs. 367.3 billion in 2010-11.

The reason was that Wireless Local Loop (WLL) segment has been hit hard with almost 40 percent decline in revenues of small WLL companies except PTCL.

Even the cellular segment showed a decline of almost 2 percent in its revenue stream from previous year mainly on account of bio-metric verification drive and resultant loss in subscriptions i.e blocking of unauthorized/unverified SIMs, which also offset the revenue generation avenues opened up with launch of 3G and 4G services.

Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA) in its report on Thursday revealed that sale of new connections also remained suspended at retailers and temporary outlets during the re-verification drive for a period of 91 days.

However, it is expected that data services will give impetus to revenue streams of the cellular mobile operators in coming years.

Telecom sector is one of the most dynamic sectors of the economy, where technology is continuously and rapidly changing, opening up new avenues of growth and healthy returns, and making some of the traditional ones less profitable.

At the same time, telecom operators are facing a new phase of competition from Over the Top (OTT) services such as Skype, Whatsapp etc., replacing part of their voice revenue.

The report said these changing dynamics are closely reflected by the trends in voice and data revenues: data revenues are now 25.6 percent of the total telecom revenues, compared to 12.4 percent in 2010. Total data revenues in telecom sector have more than doubled during last five years, reaching Rs. 115 billion in 2015.

Data revenues of cellular mobile sector have also shown a substantial increase in recent years i.e. more than three times increase during last five years. In 2015, mobile data revenues were Rs. 77.9 billion which is 25 percent of total cellular revenue.

During the last two years, cellular mobile internet and broadband usage has had a significant impact on data revenue streams of mobile sector and it is expected that this trend would continue in coming years as subscription to data connections is increasing and data usage is expanding in the country.