O2 Ireland reports it’s 2011 results

O2 Ireland have posted their full year results for 2011 and they show some interesting changes. Overall customer numbers in 2011 are down 4% which when broken down shows that pre pay customer numbers are down 10% and contract customer numbers are up 3%. Average revenue per user is down 14% (36.6 euro to 31.3 euro) and again this breaks down to a 13.3 % drop for pre pay customers (24.3 euro to 21.1 euro) and 18.2% for contract customers (53.1 euro to 43.4 euro).

Another interesting finding is that revenue on data is up by 6% (which if you exclude sms data was up 16.3%) compared with the traditional revenue area of calls which is down just over 7%. O2’s “broadband” numbers have grown over 115% compared to the same time last year. This to me may account for some of O2’s cuts to their data plans. If their revenue from data is growing then they’re going to focus on that growth area and if their mobile broadband customers are growing this fast then to keep the network stable for everyone they cut mobile phone customers data allowances since these mobile broadband customers have huge allowances of 5-15GB’s.

Revenue for O2 for 2011 totalled 723 million euro which was down 14.7% on the same time last year. Full financial results can be found here:

http://pressoffice.telefonica.com/documentos/nprensa/TEF_Europe_Q4_2011_Financials_Final_0.pdf

Now most of the networks don’t like to talk about how much they make from one country to the next, and it is very hard to compare as no method is perfectly fair but if we just look at total subscribers in the 4 O2 European markets (UK, Germany, Czech Republic, Republic of Ireland) and the total revenue for 2011 for each of these divisions we can see clearly who the largest. But if we work out the average revenue per customer we can see that Ireland is the most profitable area for O2 returning over 450 euro in revenue per customer compared with O2 Germany which only returns around 200 euro revenue per customer. As I said this is a crude method of comparison but it does go along with the long thought idea that Ireland is a profitable country for the mobile operators to do business in. Are we being ripped off? Thoughts and comments welcome below.