Advanced Television

LatAm telco revenue to hit $110bn by 2018

July 1, 2015

Latin America’s telecom services generated $107.7 billion (€96.5bn) in revenue in 2014, according to data published today by Dataxis. By 2018, this figure will grow by 2 per cent, reaching $109.8 billion.

Data includes combined revenue from mobile, fixed telephony and fixed broadband services in the region’s seven largest markets: Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Mexico, Peru and Venezuela.

At the end of 2014, the mobile sector accounted for close to 69 per cent of total telecom revenue. Although Brazil and Mexico have the highest number of lines, Chile shows the highest per capita mobile penetration rate in the region (151.7 per cent), followed by Argentina (145.8 per cent). America Móvil and Telefonica emerge as the region’s top wireless service groups, measured by number of accesses.

Meanwhile, the fixed broadband sector accounted for nearly 12 per cent of total revenue in 2014. Dataxis expects this figure to grow to close to 15 per cent by 2018. Argentina is the country with the highest fixed broadband penetration rate among the countries surveyed, with 49.5 per cent, followed by Chile (47 per cent).

Dataxis believes that DSL in its different variants will continue to be Latin America’s dominant last-mile access technology by 2018 – even when its market share will diminish in favour of other options such as cable modem and fibre to the home (FTTH).

In the fixed telephony sector, Brazil has the highest volume of operational lines, followed by Mexico. Brazil’s Oi is the company with the highest number of active fixed telephony lines in Latin America, with little over 15 million subscriptions as of the end of 2014. Mexico’s Telmex is next, with over 13 million.

Dataxis estimates that the total number of active fixed telephony lines in the region’s seven largest markets will fall by 4.6 per cent by 2018. At the same time, traditional telephony will begin to lose market share against new VoIP options, including those offered via hybrid fibre-coaxial (HFC) networks.

As of year-end 2014, cable operators’ phone lines already accounted for nearly 12 per cent of total fixed telephony lines in the analysed countries. This proportion is expected to grow to 18 per cent by 2018.

Categories: Articles, Markets, Research, Telco