Telecoms: record investment despite lower prices and ... - Clubic.com

ARCEP has published the preliminary results of its Observatory of electronic communications markets in France. In 2012, investments reached new records. But the price war has trimmed their income.

Times are generally difficult for telecom operators, except Free. Fierce competition in which they engage in fact largely benefits to consumers, according to the provisional results of the observatory electronic communications released Thursday by ARCEP. Record investments and volumes surge

One of the first significant trends in the study of ARCEP is the amount of investments made by operators. In 2012, the authority thus estimated at more than 10 billion euros, a level that has not been seen since 1998. The deployment of 4G course partly explains this trend. It is in 2012 that operators have in fact begun to deploy their networks, and work is still long. They have already spent € 2.6 billion on the year to 800 MHz, “ against 936 million in 2011 to 2.6 GHz ,” says ARCEP.

Evolution investments operators

Excluding purchase frequency, investments also beat all records. The mobile business focuses alone half of investment flows, adds authority.

Must say that the operators were faced with very high volumes over the year, mainly on mobile. ARCEP has measured traffic volume of 231.2 billion minutes on the year (13.3 billion more than in 2011) to 183.1 billion SMS. Regarding the data, the increase in subscriptions (75% of the fleet customer in 2012, against 71% in 2011) with its data offerings called “ unlimited ” allowed an explosion of more than 67% data traffic volume (95,500 terabytes).

But revenues fell with prices

With such volumes, operators would almost have expected ROI faster. Rest meantime, Free Mobile has been there, slashing prices with non-binding offers and leading its competitors in a race to the bottom. So much so that the price in the mobile fell 11.4% on average in a year. The general trend is that it is for large consumers (who benefit from the democratization of abundance tenders) for small, with newer packages designed especially for them. The lowering of the prepaid market does not escape the rule, with a price drop of about 8%.

More bad news for operators, the decline in their income, both the wholesale and retail, of the order of 3.3% year on year. 50.9 billion in 2012. Part of this decline is explained by the lower prices of call termination at the initiative of Europe, says ARCEP. The end customer market shows a loss a little sharper, from 4.1% to € 42 billion. Despite the social plans, the number of employees remained stable in contrast to a year (0.1%) , confirming an uptrend for three years. Operators use to date 129,000 people directly.

The decline in revenues is generally