The mobile telephony market progressively recovered its expansion rate and exceeded 40 million mobile lines in Peruvian territory at the end of March 2021, thus reaching proportions not seen since November 2019, the
The third month of the year closed with 911,000 more mobile lines compared to March 2020, which meant a year-on-year growth of 2.3%.
The mobile market expansion was mainly based on the intense uptake of lines from companies Entel and Bitel, which registered an annual increase of 529,881 and 581,185 lines, respectively.
Meanwhile, Claro company fell by 518,469 mobile lines.
Regarding the contractual modality, 61.9% of mobile lines belonged to the prepaid segment, a decrease of 2.7 percentage points compared to March 2020.
For their part, the remaining 38.1% belonged to the contract segment that hosts the controlled (34.7%) and postpaid (3.4%) modalities, which saw their position in the mobile market increase.
The strong percentage expansion of the youngest competitors in the mobile market, which took off in this period, was also visible.
Virtual mobile operator Guinea Mobile (owner of the Cuy Movil and Wings Mobile brands) registered 20,723 mobile lines, an increase of 1,130%. That is 12 times more than what was registered in March 2020 when it had only 1,684 lines.
For its part, Flash Mobile reached 144,016 mobile lines at the end of March 2021, seven times more if compared to the previous year (622.9%).
Meanwhile, Bitel gained 8.6% more lines, reaching 7.3 million mobile lines, followed by Entel (6.5%), which gained 8.7 million lines, and Movistar (1.4%), which reached 12.6 million lines.
However, Claro acquired 11.2 million mobile lines, a decrease of 4.4% compared to March last year.
Despite these variations in the number of lines per operating company, the same order in market share was maintained for Telefónica (31.49%), Claro (28.01%), Entel (21.83%), Bitel (18.26%), Flash Mobile (0.36%), and Guinea Mobile (0.05%) as of March 2021.
With more and more lines active in the mobile service, competition among operating companies will remain beneficial for users.