O2 takes lead in post-pay/bill pay mobile market

O2 HAS made further dents in Vodafone’s market leader position in the Irish mobile communications provider market, by becoming — for the first time — the leader in the post-pay/bill pay mobile phone market and increasing its overall customer base.

Latest second quarter figures for O2 Ireland — which is owned by Spain’s Telefonica — showed customer numbers of just under 1.72 million people for the three months to the end of June.

This was up 1.7% on the same quarter last year.

Just over 6,000 new customers signed up.

O2 Ireland’s growth in the post-pay market (a 12% increase to 662,604 customers) is of real significance as it covers both private consumers and business customers and means that the company has overtaken Vodafone Ireland there for the first time.

“Our post-pay base has been boosted by a mix of our existing pre-pay/top-up customers changing to contracts and people switching from other networks.

“One of the most pleasing aspects is that the switches have been made in response to our better value drives and more relevant price plan options, which we introduced on the back of customer research,” said O2 Ireland’s chief financial officer, Paul Whelan.

He said the company’s two major high profile sponsorship tie-ins — its title sponsorship of the O2 Arena (the former Point Depot in Dublin) and shirt sponsor of the Irish rugby team — have boosted customer numbers, the former largely to do with the priority concert ticket booking offer available to its contract customers.

Mr Whelan also said that the company has been “very pleased” with customer take-up of the iPhone product (which Apple is distributing exclusively through O2 in Ireland), even though sales figures have not been disclosed.

Main rival Vodafone Ireland saw its customer base slip from 2.33m to 2.26m in the last year — meaning that there is a gap of around 600,000 customers between the companies.