Thai Telecom Industry 2014: The Transition Year

By mk

on 5 March 2015 - 18:13 Tag:

This is a translated version from this Blognone article by @arjin published on 4 March 2015.

As Three major mobile carriers in Thailand already published their 2014 financial report, it's time to look back into 2014 and also look forward to the industry in 2015.

Market Share

2014 was another good year in term of mobile subscriber numbers. The total number was up. All three carriers, except dtac in Q2/Q3, saw their subscribers increased.

The market share of Thai mobile subscribers in 2014:

AIS at 44.3M subscribers (3.5M are in the legacy 900MHz service)
dtac at 28M
TrueMove H at 23.6M

AIS still led the pack. The gap between dtac and True is narrowing but not that much.

ส่วนแบ่งผู้ใช้งานมือถือ 2557

Decline of Voice Service, Rise of Data Service

All three carriers saw their voice services in decline but on the other hand, data services were obviously rising.

The revenue of three carriers can be summarized as:

AIS voice -14%, data +34%, total +1.2%
dtac voice -16%, data +23%, total -2.6%
TrueMove H voice has a small rise, data +24%, total +0.7%

Selling Smartphones at Cost

The big picture of 2014 is the transitioning of subscribers from legacy 2G networks to 3G 2100MHz networks. AIS has the most concern since its concession will end in 2015 while dtac still have room for transition until 2018.

The effective solution for transfering customers who still use 2G voice-only phone is selling cheap smartphone at cost. Carriers have used discount campaigns (iPhone, HTC, Samsung and so on) to drive sales. They also sold house-branded smartphones at very low cost. AIS had a good success by selling its SuperCombo phones (they are actually Lava phones from India) while dtac and True chose Chinese vendors like ZTE and Huawei.

The following table is revenue/cost comparison of carriers' smartphone business. Sales operation and marketing are not included. The unit is million Baht.

AIS revenue 23,332 , cost 23,148, profit 184 (0.79% margin)
dtac revenue 15,143 , cost 26,052, loss 909 (-6% margin)
TrueMove-H revenue 16,260, cost 15,703, profit 557 (3.43% margin)

ยอดขายมือถือสามค่าย 2557

We can see this trend continues in 2015 to move more customers into new 3G networks. AIS stated before that while it had some success on moving customers to 3G network. However many customer handsets on 3G networks are not 3G supported so 2G-roaming is still required.

Beyond cheap smartphone campaigns, all carriers are moving into premium content and Wi-Fi broadband services to off-loading congested 3G networks in city areas.