Germany still remains a prepaid-dominant mobile market

Wednesday, July 14th, 2010

Germany, the largest EU mobile market with more than 100 million users has been experiencing a very modest growth since 2008-end as it registered only a 1.3% uptake in the year to march 2010 according to Dataxis Intelligence market analysis. In absolute terms, this brings the country’s mobile base to over 108 million in the first quarter of 2010, up from 107 million a year earlier.

Another significant pattern of the German’s mobile market during the referred period is the fact that it still remains a land of prepaid mobile subscriptions as featured on the figure below. In fact, As of March 2010, prepaid subscribers accounted for 56% of the overall actual market -which represents more than 60 million customers- though they went down 1% compared to their level in 2009.

As a comparison, for instance in France, the business model is rather the other way hence post-paid customers weigh 72% of the country’s nearly 57 million market, a pattern much more similar to that of USA where 80% of mobile market is through contract.

But Germany’s dominant prepaid model may also be found in advanced mobile markets such as UK (58% of subscribers) and overwhelmingly in Italy and Portugal that are traditional prepaid markets.