GlobalData announced that total SIM growth in Europe climbed to 15.8 million in 2017, as the highest yearly increase of machine-to-machine (M2M) SIM cards over the past five years (over 21 million in 2017) was offset by continuous subscription declines in Central and Eastern Europe, stemming from lower mobile termination rates and declines in dual SIM cards.
As a consequence, the 2017 overall growth for Europe was slower than in previous years with more than 18.5 million subscriptions in 2016 and more than 27 million in 2015.
Western Europe grew by 17.3 million SIM cards in 2017, driven by a 15.2 million growth of M2M cards, against a fairly stable handsets market (over 1.5 million) and connected data devices (over 0.7 million).
France (3.3 million) and Italy (3.9 million) contributed the most in terms of M2M card growth in 2017, with most of the other Western European countries registering strong growth.
“In CEE, the growth in M2M cards by 6.6 million was not sufficient against the decline of total handsets subscriptions by 7.5 million,” stated Stephanie Char, Technology Analyst at GlobalData, “The drop was the highest in the biggest markets of the region, namely Poland, Russia, and Ukraine.”
Migration to postpaid SIM cards continued in 2017, with net additions of 9.7 million excluding M2M/Internet of Things (IoT). Prepaid cards declined by 15.7 million in the same time, with a percentage of total mobile subscription declining by 7 percentage points since 2013, to 51 percent. Differences still exist between Western Europe (highly postpaid) and CEE (highly prepaid). Excluding M2M/IoT, the share of prepaid cards in CEE has declined by 1.3 percentage points over the last five years.
Char adds: “Data usage is growing fast in the region. Average monthly data usage almost quintupled in Western Europe in the last five years to 2.2GB in 2017 and more than tripled in CEE, at 3.1GB per user per month. Other than Austria, Finland and Sweden in Western Europe, Russia is also contributing to increasing CEE’s average, with Megafon posting very high data usage – 6.5GB per user per month in 2017.”
