Consolidation has been a key feature of the mobile industry in recent years, resulting in the emergence of a number of global operator groups that serve an increasing share of the world’s mobile users. It is a phenomenon that we have been tracking for some time at Wireless Intelligence and one we believe will shape the industry as its embarks on its next phase of growth.

To track this shifting industry landscape, Wireless Intelligence has launched a new service known as ‘Scoreboard’ that will rank the largest operator groups based on a combination of the number of mobile customers they serve and the revenue they generate. We hope this service will become a trusted tool for tracking the industry’s major players and their ranking in relation to competitors. Moreover, as major M&A deals continue to drive consolidation, this service will show how these players are growing in influence and scale over time – or falling away. 

We have previously published such ranking lists on an ad-hoc basis to demonstrate the impact of major deals. Earlier this year, for example, we published a list of global operator groups to show how Bharti’s acquisition of Zain Africa established the Indian firm as one of the world’s top five groups based on mobile connections. However, Bharti (and other emerging market operators) fared less well in a subsequent study that ranked operators by revenue, which was dominated by operator groups active in highly-developed mobile markets such as Western Europe, the USA and Japan, which continue to generate the most money for operators. 

Scoreboard uses the latest Wireless Intelligence data to calculate operator rankings based on both subscriber numbers (mobile connections) and revenues in order to present a definitive list.  We will publish the top 20 global operator groups each quarter and highlight the shifts in the ranking over time. We have benchmarked the data from 12 months ago so we can offer a year-on-year comparison from the start. The first issue – based on 2Q10 figures – will be published this Thursday (16 September).

These ranking lists have always generated plenty of debate and we welcome your feedback on the service and ways we can improve it over time. However, please be sure to read our methodology – included in the footnotes of each Scoreboard quarterly report – to fully understand how it all works. 

Scoreboard is available free-of-charge to subscribers of our weekly Snapshot media bulletin, which you can sign-up to here. It will also be available on Mobile Business Briefing.

We hope you find this new service extremely useful.

Matt Ablott

The editorial views expressed in this article are solely those of the author(s) and will not necessarily reflect the views of the GSMA, its Members or Associate Members