Russell points to Wikipedia’s list of top ten mobile companies in the world. (These numbers don’t match the data from ITU (thanks Robert) which puts companies like TeliaSonera at #10 spot with 22.5 million subscribers. Also missing America Movil with 60 million subscribers.) Not many surprises there, though I was amazed to find out that China Mobile is the largest on the planet. Vodafone comes in second. By the way, by end of the year, the list is going through a lot of changes – incoming Bharti Telecom of India which already has 12.25 million subscribers, and is adding about a million or so every quarter. Reliance Infocomm has 10 million CDMA customers. BSNL, a government owned Indian cellular service has 8.5 million subscribers. Indonesian carriers are going to join the top ten list as well. via # and #
There are some more recent stats on the ITU Newslog at http://www.itu.int/osg/spu/newslog/December+2004+Top+Mobile+Operators+In+The+World.aspx
Robert Shaw, ITU
Measuring size by subscriber count is just plain stupid, its beyond meaningless (well expect for HS mfgs).
A better measure would be by network system usage (ie. MOUs), and of course the most important metric of all, total system revenue.
Here’s a fact you don’t hear often, even through VZW has more than twice the subs for Sprint PCS (pre Nextel merger), VZW only carrys about 20% more system MOUs per month.
File under, things that should make you go Hmmmm.
The big problem with MOU is that not all are paid and not all are paid at the same rate. Also, what about things like SMS and data that don’t often count for minutes? Total revenues are nice, but those numbers had AT&T Wireless and Nextel as the industry leaders yet they were on the bottom position in mergers. I think like in most industries, you need to look at growth and margins and neither one outside the context of the other.