Mobile Broadband has Potential to Significantly Increase Telecom Revenues

The Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA), revealed in its report on Thursday, that the annual revenues of the telecom sector have touched almost Rs 449.6 billion during 2015 presenting a trivial drop as compared to previous year.

Mobile Broadband has Potential to Significantly Increase Telecom Revenues

The sector recorded annual revenues of Rs 463.5 last year, whereas these were Rs 439.5 billion in 2013/14, Rs 409.2 billion in 2011/12, and Rs 367.3 billion in 2010/11.

The cause was that Wireless Local Loop (WLL) sector has been hit hard with around 40% drop in revenues of small WLL companies apart from PTCL.

Even the cellular division presented a decline of around 2% in its profits stream from the last year, basically owing to biometric verification initiative and subsequent loss in subscriptions i.e blocking of illicit and unverified SIMs, which also offset the revenue cohort opportunities opened up with take off of 3G and 4G services.

The report issued by PTA disclosed that sale of new connections were also deferred at dealers and provisional outlets during the re-verification drive for a time period of 91 days.

However, it is anticipated that data services would deliver incentive to revenue streams of the cellular mobile operators in upcoming years.

Telecom sector is one of the most vibrant sectors of the economy, where technology is constantly fluctuating and bringing new avenues of growth and vigorous revenues, while making some of the customary ones less cost-effective. The telecom operators are also facing a new chapter of competition from the Over the Top (OTT) services such as Skype and WhatsApp etc, substituting part of their voice revenue.

The report said these changing subtleties are closely redirected by the drifts in voice and data revenues, data revenues are now 25.6% of the total telecom profits compared to 12.4% in 2010.

In latest years, data revenues of cellular mobile sector have revealed a considerable rise; an increase of over three times during the past five years. In 2015, mobile data revenues were Rs77.9 billion, which is 25% of entire cellular revenue.