Mobile telephony sales up by nearly 6% in Q1

In the first quarter of this year, total sales on the mobile telephony market rose from the similar period last year by 45.1 million lei, or 5.92%, to 806.6 million lei, the National ICT Regulatory Agency reported. This is due to higher sales reported by all tree companies operating on this market: Orange Moldova, Moldcell and Moldtelecom/Unite. Orange Moldova's sales rose by 2.5% to 578.9 million lei, Moldcell's by 14.5% to 198.2 million lei and Moldtelecom's by 26.6% to 29.5 million lei. At the same time, the average rate per user (ARPU) of the three companies dropped by 7.9% to 83.82 lei. The growth was attributed to an increase in the total number of users of mobile telephony services: in the first quarter, their number rose by 16.4% to nearly 3.25 million, as the penetration rate of these services, calculated per 100 population, increased by 2.5 percentage points to 91.3%. Orange Moldova has 2.19 million users and Moldcell 1.1 million. The number of Unite users reduced slightly to 129,800 as of April 1. Significant growth was also registered in the case of 3G services. The number of users consuming at least 1MB of 3G traffic rose from January 1 by 16,300, or by 13.4%, to 137,900. In the first quarter, Orange Moldova retained the largest market share – 71.8%. Moldcell's and Moldtelecom's market shares stood at 24.6% and 3.6%, respectively.