The statistics concerning the development of the mobile phone market in the first half of 2018 shows a continuous decline in the revenues of mobile phone carriers owing to the reduction in the number of users of such services and of the voice traffic generated by these, IPN reports.

According to the National Regulatory Agency for Electronic Communications and Information Technology, the total revenues from the sale of mobile phone services declined by 99.4 million lei (-6%) compared with the corresponding period last year to over 1.5 billion lei. The number of users declined by 51,500 (-1.2%) compared with the end of 2017 to 4.4 million, while the volume of voice traffic diminished by 26.2 million minutes (-0.8%) to 3.6 billion minutes.

The data presented by the three mobile phone carriers Orange Moldova, Moldcell and Moldtelecom (Unite) show the decline was due to the lower sales of Moldcell and Orange Moldova. The sales of Moldcell diminished by 9% to 465.1 million lei, of Orange Moldova by 5.9% to 998.6 million lei. Moldtelecom reported a 12.1% increase in sales to over 82.2 million lei. Consequently, the monthly average revenue per user decreased by 2.4% to 71.3 lei. Moldtelecom reported an ARPU of 83 lei, Orange Moldova of 75.4 lei, while Moldcell of 62.4 lei.

The decrease in the total number of users was due to the diminution of the number of subscribers of Orange Moldova by 42,600 to over 2.5 million and of Moldcell by 19,900 to over 1.4 million. The customers of Moldtelecom rose in number by 10,900 to 386,200. As a result, the mobile phone penetration rate per 100 people in Moldova fell by 1.45% to 124.2%.

The average monthly traffic generated by an user in the first half of 2018 was 270 minutes (4 hours and 30 minutes), while the length of a call was 1.7 minutes.

At the end of the first half of this year, the market shares of the three mobile phone carriers by turnover were as follows: Orange Moldova – 64.6%, Moldcell – 30.1% and Moldtelecom – 5.3%.