Chile – telecom market outlook.
While the country’s GDP is expected to contract in 2009, the telecom sector outlook is reasonably auspicious. As a relative cash cow with low exposure to economic cycles, Chile’s telecom market is expected to continue growing despite the recession, although growth will inevitably decelerate.
The telecom service worst affected in Chile appears to be mobile telephony, probably because it was already approaching early market saturation. In fact, growth had already slowed to 9% in the twelve months to June 2008, even before the onset of the global financial crunch. Since that time, Chile has systematically recorded the slowest levels of mobile growth in Latin America.
Since mid-2008, Chile’s fixed line market has shown no particular change compared with previous years, continuing to inch forward at an annual growth rate of around 2%.
Chile’s broadband market continues to expand throughout the recession, but at a reduced rate, with ADSL suffering more than cable modem.
Satellite TV (recently launched by Telefónica and Telmex) and triple play solutions appear to be the winners during this economic downturn. As a result, pay TV and cable modem services have suffered little from the crisis – a notable difference from the Latin American recession of 2000-2002, when pay TV was the worst affected telecom service. Nevertheless, while satellite TV shows healthy growth rates, the cable TV market did shrink marginally (by 0.3%) between November 2008 and January 2009, down from 6.0% annual growth in 2007.
Telecom companies do not appear to have suffered too badly, on the whole. Telefónica Chile, for example, reported a 17% year-on-year increase in net profits for the first quarter of 2009, with pay TV the best performer followed by broadband.
See also:
