Britons opt for mobile phones at Christmas
BY MARTIN BARROW
MOBILE phones were Britain’s best-selling Christmas gift. Figures due to be published this week will confirm that more than 4.5 million handsets were sold in the run-up to Christmas, with a record five million phones sold during the whole of the fourth quarter.
The UK’s four mobile phone operators will publish quarterly subscriber numbers that are expected to show that sales have more than doubled over the final quarter of 1999. Up to 3.7 million phones were sold in the third quarter of 2000.
Children were the biggest recipients of mobile phones as gifts. Tony Lees, a spokesman for NOP Research Group, said: “Forget games consoles, the new object of desire for today’s children is a mobile phone.”
Recent sales data has shown strong gains for Orange and One 2 One, the two smallest operators. However, analysts believe that BT Cellnet may have done particularly well in the final three months of last year. Vodafone is the market leader, with BT Cellnet, in second place, under threat from Orange.
With more than 50 per cent of the UK population already using mobile phones, analysts believe there will be a steady rise in disconnection rates early this year as subscribers dump their old handsets and switch to another mobile phone operator.
Tomorrow J Sainsbury will announce the launch of a mobile phone service, aiming to gain a slice of a market now worth almost £3 billion a year.
Sainsbury’s One will operate in partnership with BT Cellnet and America’s Mosaic Group. The supermarket chain claims it can guarantee users the best deal through a system that checks calls against every standard tariff across the UK’s four mobile phone networks and charges the lowest price available.
Sara Weller, Sainsbury’s marketing director, said: “This is the biggest shake-up the UK mobile phone market has ever seen.”
Customers will receive monthly bills of their calls and an analysis of their call charges compared with the other available standard tariffs. |
