Bahrain mobile phone users fell in H1 - report

The number of mobile phone subscribers in Bahrain fell in the first half of the year as a “significant number” of inactive prepaid customers were removed by operators Batelco and Zain Bahrain, a new report has said.

Business Monitor International's latest update on Bahrain’s telecommunications market added that the subscriber based was 1.5 percent lower at the end of June, compared to the beginning of 2009.

Also by the end of June, Bahrain’s mobile penetration rate had risen to 141.5 percent, the BMI report said.

The high penetration rate pointed not only to a multiple SIM ownership trend, but also to a significant number of inactive users, BMI added.

"By the end of June, Bahrain’s mobile subscriber base was 1.5% lower than at the start of the year. The shrinking customer base appears to be the result of moves by both operators to deduct inactive prepaid customers from their respective customer totals," the study said.

BMI also predicted that the launch of commercial services by Bahrain’s third mobile operator, Saudi Telecom Company, "will result in a further stimulus for growth".

"By the end of 2009, we predict a market of just over 1.4m mobile customers and a penetration rate of 147 percent. We also anticipate strong growth in the number of 3G subscribers, predicting that over 28 percent of the Bahraini mobile subscriber base will have 3G handsets at the end of 2009," BMI added.

The latest regulatory data shows that recent months have seen significant growth in the number of mobile broadband users. Meanwhile, in the fixed-line sector, regulatory data shows that the number of fixed-line customers grew by 8.3 percent in 2008 to surpass 220,000 at the end of the year.

"It appears that recent fixedline growth has been driven by the deployment of fixed wireless services by alternative operators such as Kalaam Telecom," the report said.

BMI added that alternative operators were also making headway in the fixed broadband sector, which saw growth of over 37 percent in 2008 and which had a penetration rate of 8.8 percent at the end of the year.

Within Bahrain’s broadband market, BMI is predicting an average annual growth rate of over 7 percent over the next five years.

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