Communications sector grows 47 percent in third quarter

ANKARA

Türkiye’s communications sector grew by 47 percent in the third quarter of 2022, Transport and Infrastructure Minister Adil Karaismailoğlu has said.

Net sales revenues of operators in the local communications sector reached 35.1 billion Turkish Liras ($1.87 billion) in the quarter, rising nearly 50 percent, he added.

The number of mobile subscribers in Türkiye increased to 90.8 million, indicating a penetration rate of 107.2 percent, Karaismailoğlu said, citing the latest report by the Information and Communication Technologies Authority (BTK).

Excluding the population aged between 0 to 9, the penetration rate was 114.6 percent, according to the report.

The monthly talk time average was 569 minutes per subscriber in Türkiye, which ranked as the first among European countries, the report said.

The combined net sales revenues of the four largest players in the market, namely TT Mobil, Turkcell, Türk Telekom and Vodafone, were around 26 billion liras, while other operators’ revenues amounted to 9.6 billion liras.

Investments by those four companies stood at 5.1 billion liras in the third quarter and other companies’ investments in the sector were 2.2 billion liras, according to the report.

The mobile voice traffic stood at 80.6 billion minutes in the July-September period, rising 0.6 percent in the second quarter of 2022.

The traffic on the fixed lines was 1.2 billion minutes. Türk Telekom’s fixed line revenues grew 27 percent on an annual basis in the third quarter to around 1.1 billion liras.

The number of broadband subscribers, which stood at around 6 million in 2008, leaped to 91.4 million as of the third quarter, while total internet subscriptions grew by 2.1 percent compared with the second quarter, according to the BTK report.

As of end-September, there were around 4.3 million 3G and more than 83.4 million 4.5G subscribers in the country. However, the number of active 4.5G users was 64.3 million because some people’s mobile phones or SIM cards are not compatible with 4.5G, which was introduced to the local market in April 2016.

In terms of the number of subscribers, Turkcell was the largest company in the sector with a market share of 41.3 percent, followed by Vodafone at 30.8 percent. TT Mobil’s market share was 27.9 percent.

The length of the fiber optic network reached 498,000 kilometers.