Cut-price services hit O2 Ireland revenue

O2 Ireland has attributed a fall in third-quarter revenues to consumer demand for its cut-price service offerings and rising competitiveness in the overall mobile phone sector.

The company yesterday reported a 1.7% year-on-year fall in service revenue — which measures revenue made from things like SMS text messaging and 3G downloads.

Basic monthly revenue — or average revenue per user (ARPU) — from pre-pay or top-up customers was up slightly on the previous quarter at 30, but down from the 31 measured in the third-quarter of last year.

Monthly average ARPU for post-pay or bill pay customers was 83, down from 88 in the previous quarter and down from 91 for the same quarter last year.

The company has seen growth in a number of its special offers including 1c calls and texts at weekends for pre-pay customers, Free Fiver Fridays giving pre-pay customers 25% extra free if they top up on Fridays and a reduced flat-rate voice roaming rate for people travelling within the EU called the My Europe roaming tariff.

O2 did, however, see a 2.1% rise in its Irish customer base to 1.6 million customers by the end of September.

The average number of monthly minutes of use on the O2 network here also rose, year-on-year in the quarter, up by 9% and some 397 million text messages were sent during the three month period, representing a 9.7% increase in text usage on the same period last year.

Paul Whelan, chief financial officer at O2 Ireland, said: “In what is a very competitive market we are pleased with our performance this quarter. In line with our strategy, we have seen a significant increase in our post-pay base, up by over 16,000 customers in the quarter and 60,000 year-on-year.”