THE SLOVAK telecommunications market reported a year-on-year (y-o-y) revenue increase of 3.7 percent in 2008, to €2.3 billion. The dominant landline operator in Slovakia, Slovak Telekom (ST), released this estimate on March 3, the SITA newswire wrote.
ST president and the chairman of the board of directors, Miroslav Majoroš, also said that the segment of mobile telephone services saw the highest growth of 5.3 percent y-o-y. Internet services also posted significant growth.
Orange Slovensko is the largest single mobile telephone operator in the Slovak market with a overall telecommunications market share of 37.6 percent.
The joint market share of Slovak Telekom and its affiliated T-Mobile, reached 46.6 percent of the overall market.
T-Mobile alone had a 25.8 percent market share. Other alternative operators posted a combined market share of 13.8 percent while Telefónica O2 Slovakia, the smallest mobile operator in the Slovak market, had only a 2 percent share.
The overall penetration of mobile telephone services stood at 103 percent of the population as of December 31, 2008, with the number of customers estimated to be 5.57 million.
Revenues from mobile telephone services accounted for €1.5 billion of total sales. Among the strongest growth impulses are the activities of the third mobile operator, demand for broadband internet and a tendency for people to have several SIM cards.
The penetration of broadband internet connections was estimated to be 34 percent at the end of last year.
The estimated total number of broadband internet connections, including mobile connections, increased to 790,000, up 36.8 percent y-o-y, with those using mobile broadband internet services increasing by 67 percent y-o-y.
The main features of the Slovak internet access market in the last year have been a growing availability of these services, higher access speeds, market consolidation and infrastructure expansion.
Author: Compied by Spectator staff from press reports
