France: 3G Entrant Free Disrupting Mobile Market, Pushing Competitors to Accelerate LTE Plans

Summary Already the largest in Western Europe, the French telecom services market is expected to grow at a CAGR of 1.9% and reach $65.4bn in 2018, in spite of a depressed macroeconomic environment and mature markets for fixed voice, broadband, mobile voice and pay-TV. Mobile broadband, powered by 4G networks, will be the largest contributor to telecom services revenue growth, followed by fixed broadband access, which will be strengthened with increasing FTTH deployments and widely popular multiplay offers. Key Findings The French telecom market generated $58.3bn in service revenue in 2012, which was down 7.3% year-on-year, or a 9.9% drop in local currency terms. Besides the unfavorable exchange rates, service prices have fallen dramatically as a result of increasing competitive pressures, particularly in the mobile market with the entry in January 2012 of the fourth 3G licensee, Free, which offered unlimited voice plans with 3GB of data for merely $25 (€20) per month. We expect the deployment of LTE and FTTH networks combined with revenues associated with new business lines including M2M services, cloud computing, content aggregation and mobile payment/NFC to help turn around the declining revenue trend over the forecast period. In particular, we expect mobile data services to be the fastest-growing segment of the market with a 2012-2018 CAGR of 10.5%, presenting a cumulative opportunity of $102.4bn between 2013 and 2018. We expect to see overall service revenue grow at a 1.9% CAGR over the 2012-2018 period. Besides mobile data, broadband and pay-TV will contribute to the market growth with respective CAGRs of 4.8% and 2.9%. Synopsis NA