According to the market research firm Telecompaper, telecom operators in Netherlands have registered a decline in their revenues for the second consecutive year.
The total revenue of Netherlands? telecom industry has declined by 4.5 per cent in 2012 to stand at Euro 5.8 billion. The sharp drop in revenue was on account of regulatory uncertainty in the country. While the revenue from mobile data services continues to grow, the rate of growth has come down to single digit, indicating that the uptake of data services has not been fully able to compensate for the drop in voice revenues.
According to the quarterly report by the research firm, the mobile service revenue for three months ending December, 2012, declined by 6.8 percent year-on-year to Euro 1.4 billion.
For 2013, Telecompaper expects the Dutch market?s revenue to stand at Euro 5.6 billion registering a decline of two to three per cent over 2012. It has further downgraded the Dutch telecom market and expects it to report annual compounded growth rate of -1 per cent for 2013-17. It estimates that industry revenue will reach Euro 5.5 billion in 2017. The downgrade in the forecast is due to expected late effects of the economic slowdown, continued regulation and a larger impact from the threats from over-the-top and Wi-Fi services. The market researcher predicts that operators will be forced to adjust their pricing further, in order to offset the effects of regulation and the shift in customer behavior to more data-centric services.
