Mobile internet usage to impact telecom revenues drastically

ISLAMABAD: The annual revenues of the telecom sector have reached around Rs449.6 billion during 2015 showing a slight decline as compared to last year, the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA) revealed in its report on Thursday.

The sector registered annual revenues of Rs463.5 last year, while these were Rs439.5 billion in 2013/14, Rs409.2 billion in 2011/12, and Rs367.3 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 Pakistan Telecommunication Company Limited.

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

The Pakistan Telecommunication Authority report said 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 would 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 changing and opening up new avenues of growth and healthy returns, while making some of the traditional ones less profitable.

At the same time, the telecom operators face 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 in2010.

Total data revenues in telecom sector have more than doubled during the last five years, reaching Rs115 billion in 2015.

Data revenues of cellular mobile sector have also shown a substantial increase in recent years; an increase of more than three times during the last five years.

In 2015, mobile data revenues were Rs77.9 billion, which is 25 percent of total cellular revenue.