Posts Tagged ‘South America’
Paraguay State Owned Copaco Buys Hola Paraguay
Paraguay’s state-owned telecoms network operator, Copaco has announced that it has brought the local mobile network, Hola Paraguay, which trades as Vox for an undisclosed amount. The company said that it aims to boost the subscriber base to 500,000 customers by the end of this year, and 2 million customers within five years.
According to figures from the Mobile World analysts, the company had 432,000 subscribers at the end of March 2010. This represented a market share of 7.3%.
The company aims to help boost the subscriber base by providing free SIM cards to its 360,000 landline customers, and expects to be able to convert around 100,000 into paying subscribers. In addition, the goal is to reach 1 million landline subscribers between basic and fixed wireless for the five-year period beginning in 2008.
Although the government hasn’t confirmed the price paid, local media reports suggest that it was in the region of just US$3 million. Hola Paraguay was 70% owned by Japan’s KDDI Corp.
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America Movil net profit jumps 50.6% in Q3
America Movil reported third-quarter revenues of MXN 99.8 billion, up 16.9 percent from a year earlier. Services revenues rose 19.5 percent on the back of strong data-revenue growth and a continued increase in the subscriber base. The company, which operates under the name Claro, added a net 4.0 million new susbcribers in the third quarter, of which almost a fourth were postpaid, for a total 194.3 million mobile and 3.8 million fixed-line users at the end of September. Brazil led the way with 1.8 million net gains, followed by Tracfone in the US with 712,000, Mexico with 280,000 and Argentina with 236,000. The company said it some signs of economic recovery in several countries during the quarter, especially in South America. However, subscriber growth remained below last year’s levels, apart from at Tracfone. EBITDA came in at MXN 40.4 billion, up 15.9 percent year-on-year, giving a margin similar to a year ago at 40.5 percent. Net profit jumped 50.6 percent to MXN 18.7 billion, driven by a 82.5 percent decline in financing costs thanks to foreign currency movements. America Movil spent MXN 25.5 billion on capital equipment in the first nine months of 2009, helping to take its 3G coverage to 70 percent of the population in its Latin America markets.
