Hutchison will continue to outpace competitors Telstra and Optus...

Hutchison will continue to outpace competitors Telstra and Optus on subscriber growth in Australia's mobile operator market.
This Mobile Forecast on Australia provides over 65 operational and financial metrics for the Australia wireless market. We cover quarterly historical data starting in 1Q2004 and ending in 1Q2008. We also provide four-year forecasts at the operator level going out to 2010. Operators covered for Australia include: Telstra, Optus, Vodafone, and Hutchison. Our Mobile Forecasts are updated quarterly and are available for one-time delivery or through regular updates.
Notable highlights of the 3Q08 Australia Mobile Forecast include:
- The level of wireless penetration in Australia will continue to increase and it will reach 109.3% in 2010.
- We continue to see Hutchison as the growth story in Australia's mobile space. We are now predicting an even more aggressive average annual subscriber growth rate for Hutchison in Australia at 13.7% during the forecast period 2008-2010 (our previous forecast for Hutchison was 10.8% average annual growth). This far outpaces operators like Telstra and Optus, which we expect will see their subscriber growth remain at around 1.5% - 1.7% during the forecast period.
- Australia's largest operator, Telstra, will continue to enjoy the highest level of profitability in the operator space with 42.9% EBITDA margins in 2010. We maintain our profitability estimates primarily because, despite aggressive mobile broadband offerings in the market from other carriers, Telstra has been able to sustain its wireless broadband subscriber growth while only seeing a modest decline in its ARPU levels.
- We continue to forecast that in 2010, Hutchison will receive the highest ARPU at AUD 67.27 per month (previous forecast: AUD 64.68 per month) while Optus will receive the lowest ARPU of AUD 45.62 per month in the country.
- Like in other developed countries, data ARPU is increasing in Australia as people substitute phone calls with text messages and web searches. We think that Hutchison's 3G gambles are now paying off in Australia and that Mobile broadband pricing will firm up in the coming quarters. We are maintaining our forecast that Hutchison will receive the highest data ARPU of AUD 22.87 per month (previously AUD 19.41) in 2010.