[Berlin, GERMANY] In the past financial year, Germany’s T-Mobil managed to
more than double its number of T-D1 customers.
As of December 31, 2000,
there were 19.14 million customers using the Bonn-based company’s digital
cellular phone network to communicate. That was almost 10.1 million – or 111
percent – more than in the year before (9.07 million).
In the same
period of time, the entire German market increased 104 percent, from
23.5 to 48 million participants.
“That means that we’ve grown faster
than the market, and we’ve reduced the distance to Vodafone D2 to a
minimum,” confirmed the head of T-Mobil’s management, Reni Obermann,
yesterday in Bonn. The market share of T-D1 remained constant at nearly
40 percent.
There was also a positive development in the limited company turnover of
T-Mobil and the results, especially in the second half of the year, says
Obermann. “Particularly in the area of returns, we saw welcome
improvements in the third and fourth quarters. Even in the year of the
greatest customer growth, T-Mobil was a profitable company,” said the
head of T-Mobil. More detailed figures are to be published in the coming
week, together with the preliminary figures from Deutsche Telekom.
T-Mobil foresees a slowdown in growth for the current year.
There was also a boom in mobile data communication in the past year. The
number of short messages transmitted over the T-D1 network rose from
around 300 million in December 1999 to around 650 million in the same
month of the past year. In the year 2000, a total of more than 5.5
billion short messages were sent via T-D1. Obermann also reported an
increase in the number of WAP users, which passed the one million mark (US $
0.48 million) for the first time for T-D1 in the last quarter of 2000.
Obermann announced that February 1st is the date for the commercial launch
of the first country-wide GPRS operation from a German network operator.
T-Mobil invested around 300 million deutschmarks in the introduction of
the new technology. With GPRS, rather than time-based billing there is
to be a primarily volume-based billing of the data transmitted.
Depending on the rate model chosen, the price of the transmission will
be somewhere between 19 and 69 pfennigs (US $0.09 and US $0.33) per 10
kilobytes. In addition to this, there will be either a daily dial-up fee or
a flat monthly rate.
