Communications sector revenues up 41 percent

ISTANBUL

The combined sales revenues of communications companies in Türkiye increased by 40.7 percent in 2022 compared with the previous year to reach 130 billion Turkish Liras, a report by the Information and Communication Technologies Authority (BTK) has shown.

In the final quarter alone sales revenues of those companies stood at 40 billion liras. 

Investments made by the communications companies amounted to 31 billion liras last year, showing an increase of 42.7 percent from 2021. There were also around 11.2 million fixed-line users. 

As of the end of 2022, there were 90.3 million mobile subscribers in Türkiye, which corresponded to a penetration rate of 105.9 percent, according to the report. The number of mobile phone users increased by 4.6 percent from 2021, while fixed-line subscribers fell by 9 percent in 2022 compared with the previous year. 

Mobile operator Turkcell was the largest player in terms of the number of subscribers at a market share of 41.5 percent, followed by Vodafone at 30.2 percent and TT Mobil at 28.2 percent.

Turkcell’s share in total revenues was  41.1 percent, slightly down from a share of 42.3 percent in 2021. 

There were a total of 464 operators in Türkiye’s electronic communications industry, the report said. The number of subscribers to 4.5G services, which was launched in 2016, was 82.9 million or 91.9 percent of all mobile users.

The mobile voice traffic exceeded 319 billion minutes last year, said the report, adding that M2M subscribers grew 8.7 percent last year from 2021 to reach 8.1 million.

The number of broad band internet subscribers increased by 2.5 million in 2022 to 90.6 million, including 71.7 million mobile users. 

The fiber internet infrastructure was expanded by 9.8 percent to 517,000 kilometers, while fiber internet subscribers grew nearly 18 percent last year to 5.7 million, BTK reported. 

“The monthly average data usage by broadband internet subscribers was 243 Gigabytes in the final quarter of 2022, rising from 204 GB a year earlier, while this was 14.8 GB for mobile users, up from 11 GB from the fourth quarter of 2021,” BTK furthered.

In the whole of 2022, the internet usage amounted to 65.3 billion GB, BTK stated.