Telcowatch shows mobile market stable in lockdown

The latest Telcowatch mobile market share report shows the relative performance of New Zealand’s carriers were close to unchanged during the second quarter of 2020. This is the period that covered much of the nation’s Covid-19 lockdown.

It paints a picture of a stable market with, apart from a special case we’ll look at later, little switching between carriers.

One conclusion you can read into the numbers is that Vodafone’s considerable investment building a 5G network ahead of its rivals has not paid off in terms of attracting their business.

Vodafone top brand

Vodafone remained the leader with a 37 per cent market share. That’s the same market share as in the first quarter. Vodafone has been the largest single carrier brand for a year now.

Spark retains its second spot with 34 per cent. Its share fell a fraction during the quarter.

Yet the story is more complicated than these numbers suggest. Spark’s cut-price Skinny brand was the largest climber during the period. It has a 7 per cent share of the market.

Spark top carrier

If you add Spark and Skinny, the two are brands that share resources, the total is 41 per cent. That figure has been stable now for months.

Meanwhile 2degrees brings up the rear with 23 per cent.

In practice each of the three carriers is stable. The movement is all about Spark customers realising they can get what amounts to the same service for less if they switch to the company’s Skinny brand.

Skinny has seen its market share rise for the last three quarters while Spark’s has fallen.

Telcowatch is put together by Datamine. It says it analyses more than 2.9 million unique devices each month. The company restricts its data collection to active mobile devices and does not count machine to machine activity or non-consumer markets. Nor does it measure overseas-based networks operating here.