According to the third ETNO Annual Economic Report, jointly prepared with IDATE, fixed telephony revenues across the continent have experienced a decline of 8%, while mobile revenues have reduced only 0.6% and broadband markets revenue grew by 4%.
However, despite a revenue decline by 1.5% in 2011, investments in fixed and mobile sectors continued to grow by 4.6%. Europe’s share of global telecoms markets, however, shrunk from 31 to 25% over the last six years.
“Latest figures demonstrate that in 2011 EU telecoms sector’s revenues experienced a decline for the third year in a row, in a context of moderate economic recovery, showing that structural rather than cyclical changes are shaping the sector. Despite this complex scenario, data shows that operators remain committed to investing and continue driving broadband deployment. Creating the best conditions for investment and reassuring the markets in today’s difficult times must remain the key priorities”, said Luigi Gambardella, ETNO executive board chair.
“The continued increase in the usage of social networking sites and other Over the Top applications confirms the need for new models of cooperation. Policies for our sector need to be flexible in order to enable operators to adapt to rapidly changing realities and let new business models emerge from the markets.”
Gambardella added that ETNO believes that an “urgent debate” at EU level is needed to find possible policy solutions to these problems. The sustainability of the telecom industry, as well as that of other sectors such as the publishers and broadcasters, need to be addressed, he argued.
“Telecom sector’s revenues in Europe are expected to decrease again slightly over the current year but telcos continued to invest heavily as customer needs increase very rapidly: capacities of fixed and mobile networks have to be upgraded continuously to support bigger and bigger volumes of data. IDATE estimates that data traffic is increasing by 60% a year on average, even 100% if we consider only mobile data traffic, mainly driven by video,” added Didier Pouillot from IDATE
