Leadership

O2 customers spending less, texting more

29.07.2010
Telefonica O2 Ireland has issued its Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) for Q2 showing that while the customer base in growing, the average spend is dropping and people are sending more text messages.

The total customer base for O2 Ireland has grown by 5,200 to reach 1.711 million by the end of June 2010.

O2 Ireland’s KPI for Q2 shows that overall 1.659 billion text messages were sent in the first six months of 2010, an increase of 8.3pc on the same period last year. In this same period O2 customers talked on the phone for 2.347 billion minutes.

Service revenue for Q2 is at €193m which is down from €196m in the last quarter but data revenue unsurprisingly continues to grow, making non-SMS revenue account for 12.8pc of the overall service revenue in Q2, something that O2 attributes to the increasing number of smartphone and mobile broadband customers. The current number of mobile broadband customers with O2 stands at 146,000.

Although non-SMS revenue continues to grow, the actual average spend per customer (ARPU) has dropped: while this was €39.55 for Q2 last year in 2010 it fell to €37.14 in Q2 2010.

Breaking this down, the monthly average ARPU for prepay customers for the first six months of 2010 was €24.33, down from €24.86 this time last year, while postpay had dropped the most from €63.50 to €55.46.

With the average spend dropping across the board, O2 has seen average monthly minutes of use increase by three minutes per user to 231 from Q2 of last year.

“The trading environment remained very challenging in Q2, and in line with industry trends, we continue to see downward pressure on revenues as customers change their usage patterns and look for greater flexibility and control over their costs,” said Paul Whelan, chief financial officer, Telefónica O2 Ireland.