PENETRATION of mobile telephony services in Slovakia reached 104.8 percent as of late December 2009, up 3.56 percentage points on an annual basis. The three mobile operators in Slovakia, Orange Slovensko, T-Mobile Slovensko and Telefónica O2 Slovakia registered 5.659 million active SIM cards as of the end of last year, which is a net increase of 192,000 year-on-year, the SITA newswire wrote in early March.
As of December 31, 2009, Orange registered 2.891 million active SIM cards within the sectors of prepaid and postpaid services, compared with 2.215 million in T-Mobile and 553,000 in Telefónica O2 Slovakia. Nearly 3 percent of the total number of O2 clients were users of mobile services provided by O2 in partnership with retail chains Nay and Tesco (Nay Mobile and Tesco Mobile) and the telecom company Swan (Swan Mobile) within the model of brand resellers. The smallest mobile telephony operator in Slovakia, Telefónica O2 Slovakia, was the only one to post annual growth in active clients of 228, 000. The number of active SIM cards in T-Mobile did not change and Orange reported a decline of 36,000.
The figure related to penetration of mobile services is calculated on the basis of comparable methodology, classifying customers of prepaid services who conducted at least one active transaction on their SIM cards in the past three months, together with clients using postpaid services as active clients, according to SITA. The number of Slovakia's residents, 5.4 million, serves as the basis for these calculations. Operators’ data cover the overall number of clients, including SIM cards used in technological devices, GSM gateway operations, mobile internet services, telemetry and others, which makes it impossible to state figures solely in terms of physical persons.
