O2 has outsold Orange in the sale of iPhones at Xmas, the mobile phone organisation claims. Photograph: TOBY MELVILLE/REUTERS
O2 sole some-more iPhones in the UK than Orange in the run-up to Christmas, according to trainer Matthew Key, notwithstanding the hype surrounding Orange"s success in finale O2"s two-year disdainful hold on the Apple device.
On Thursday, Orange voiced it sole 222,000 iPhones in the last entertain of 2009, carrying usually had the handset given mid-November.
The iPhone helped the company, owned by France Telecom, convince some-more people to pointer up to long-term contracts than it has ever managed in a fourth entertain before. Vodafone and Tesco Mobile are additionally right afar offered the iPhone to their customers.
But Matthew Key, who runs Telefonica O2 Europe, pronounced he had not seen a mass mass departure of British commercial operation lured on to opposition networks by the iPhone.
"I cannot discuss it you a specific series but [what] I can discuss it you is we sole some-more iPhones than Orange in the fourth entertain – we did some-more than 222,000," he said, after O2 voiced the fourth-quarter results. "We are saying positively no justification of commercial operation withdrawal us to go behind to Orange or Vodafone who had formerly come to us from them to buy an iPhone."
In the last 3 months of 2009, O2 combined 338,455 new users, receiving the patron bottom to 21.3 million and maintaining the on all sides as the UK"s largest network. Of those new users, 235,486 sealed up to long-term contracts.
Its opening in conditions of new patron numbers, however, was the misfortune of the 4 vital UK networks. In the same period, Orange gained 404,000, T-Mobile 571,000 and Vodafone 410,000.
The industry"s fourth-quarter figures, however, lift the subject of possibly someone has lost commercial operation or there is double-counting, since it is really doubtful that 1.7 million people picked up a mobile phone for the initial time only prior to Christmas.
Key reckons a little players – not, he stressed O2 – have been throwing really poor pre-pay deals at commercial operation and distorting the market. It raises the awaiting of a repeat of the supposed "box-breaking" that strike the industry a couple of years ago.
Box-breaking occurs when a mobile phone association subsidises an tasteful handset for pre-pay users. People buy the handset, throw afar the operator"s Sim label and possibly have the handset unbarred so that they can have use of it with their existent Sim label – effectively removing a poor handset ascent – or sell it, mostly overseas.
On paper it looks similar to the user has done a sale but over time it becomes viewable that the patron is not utilizing their network and effectively they have squandered the handset subsidy.
"I see at the net patron additions in entertain 4 and logically it cannot have sense," certified Key. "We think that a little of the alternative operators have driven commercial operation that has been about pushing patron numbers in the short term, but essentially in the middle tenure that patron will not outlay any income with them."
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