Turks spend 32 billion liras for communication

ANKARA

The frontrunners of the sector, landline operator Türk Telekom and mobile operators Turkcell, Vodafone and Avea, kept their places at top by accounting for over 80 percent of net sales revenues. REUTERS photo

Turkey spent over 32 billion Turkish Liras on communication in 2013, while more than 80 percent of the amount went into the cashboxes of Turkey’s top four telecommunication companies.

According to the sector report released by the Communication Technologies Institution (BTK), the communication sector’s sales income was boosted by 7.26 percent in 2013 as Turkish people spent 32.3 billion liras on communicating through phone calls, SMS messages and data usage.

The four leading players in the sector, landline operator Türk Telekom and mobile operators Turkcell, Vodafone and Avea dominated the sector last year as well, as their revenues jumped 9 percent on an annual basis to 25.9 billion liras. The top four operators’ net sales revenue was 23.8 billion back in 2012.

SMS and land line retreat

Accounting for 28.25 percent of the total revenues, Turkcell received the lion’s share of the communication income.

Türk Telekom followed the company that has been troubled with a series of disputes between its shareholders by collecting 22.41 percent of the revenues, while Vodafone ranked third with 17.76 percent.

The other companies in the sector, meanwhile, only managed to slightly increase their share of Turks’ vocal, data and SMS message traffic spending. They raised their sales revenues 1.1 percent to become 6.36 billion liras, the BTK data has shown.

Fixed and mobile telephone traffic volume soared by 7 percent compared to the previous year and reached 202.6 billion minutes, the report read.

Of the total calls, 17.7 billion minutes of conversation were held over landlines, marking a 14 percent drop from 2012. People abandoned landlines and apparently rushed to mobile phones, as the mobile phone call volume surged 9.5 percent to become 185.9 billion minutes during the same period.

Turkey has been the top European country in average monthly phone call duration for the past two years and in 2013, the country maintained the momentum, as the average monthly phone call duration rose 7.8 percent to 330 minutes.

Meanwhile, SMS messaging traffic has faced a slowdown due to the popularization of online messaging mediums.  The SMS traffic increase rate, which was 8.3 percent, plunged to 1.57 percent last year.

Around 177.6 billion texts were exchanged throughout the year.