The full implementation of number portability is about to reach its first anniversary, and the winner may be different

On August 5, 2019, number portability entered the implementation stage.

On November 10, 2019, the number portability service of the three major operators officially entered the trial operation stage. On November 27, 2019, the number portability service was officially provided nationwide. From entering the landing stage to trial operation and then to full implementation, number portability is about to usher in the first anniversary of full implementation. The debate over who is the winner may have a preliminary conclusion.

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1. Net increase in mobile phone users, China Telecom leads

Recently, the three major operators have released their monthly reports for September 2020. So far, the operating conditions in the first three quarters of this year have been fully revealed. Judging from the published user growth data, China Telecom has the largest net increase in mobile phone users, far exceeding China Mobile and China Telecom.

The operating data for the first three quarters of this year show that China Telecom is the only one of the three operators to achieve positive growth in mobile phone users, and from the analysis of the data composition, China Telecom's user increase is roughly equivalent to the total loss of China Mobile and China Unicom. Is there a correlation between them?

Although we cannot directly conclude that the growth of China Telecom's mobile phone users is due to the loss of users from China Mobile and China Unicom, facing the same macroeconomic situation, China Telecom's leading position must have its own unique reasons, which may be due to number portability.

With the positive growth of China Telecom's mobile phone users, can we directly define China Telecom as the winner of number portability? Although we have not seen the official specific data on number portability, this current inference is more in line with the logic of ordinary people.

2. The growth of mobile phone users was driven by broadband

Monthly reports released by the three major operators show that my country's broadband users have maintained a good growth momentum. The combined user growth of the three has exceeded 23 million households, of which China Mobile's net increase in broadband users alone has exceeded 17 million households.

At present, most broadband users of the three major operators are fixed-mobile converged broadband, that is, it has become the norm to develop broadband through mobile phone numbers, or to develop mobile phone numbers through broadband. Moreover, users obtained in this way have a high stickiness to the operator and are not likely to leave the network.

If analyzed according to the official statistical caliber of a family of three, China Mobile has bundled about 600 million mobile phone numbers through broadband, while China Telecom can bundle about 460 million mobile numbers. However, China Telecom currently has only about 350 million mobile phone number users.

If we continue to follow this logic, then China Telecom's mobile phone users will continue to grow in the future, and there is still room for growth of about 100 million households; similarly, China Mobile's fixed-line broadband users will continue to grow, and there is also room for growth of about 100 million households.

Although it is not easy for China Mobile's broadband users and China Telecom's mobile phone users to grow by 100 million in the future, after all, due to competition, the number of users will further squeeze the existing growth space. However, this logic is still reasonable.

This logic also applies to China Unicom. China Unicom's broadband user scale can achieve the bundling of about 260 million mobile phone numbers, which may also explain to some extent why China Unicom's mobile number users are lost. At the same time, this also explains why China Mobile broadband sits on the top spot.

3. Number portability and broadband: which is the main driving force for growth?

Number portability will undoubtedly lead to an increase in mobile phone users, and broadband users can also achieve the goal of driving the growth of mobile phone users. The two driving forces exist at the same time, so which one is the main driving force for the growth of mobile phone users?

So far, we have not found the source of the growth of mobile phone users of the three major operators, but compared with the fuss of number portability and the three major operators' unwillingness to give in to number portability, the main driving force for the growth of mobile phone users comes from broadband. After all, once broadband users have been encircled, it is only a matter of time before the mobile phone numbers of this network are activated.

Considering that China Telecom has a large room for growth in mobile phone users due to the scale of broadband users, we logically infer that China Telecom's mobile phone user growth mainly comes from broadband bundling. After all, when everyone is on high alert, it is easier to expand business from broadband.

Judging from the current situation, China Telecom's future mobile phone user growth will still be a high probability event, just as China Mobile's broadband user growth is not easy to stop. Finding out the reasons supporting the growth of China Mobile's broadband users and China Telecom's mobile phone users will help us understand the competition trend of the industry.

After the full implementation of the number portability policy, the three major operators have carried out various preferential marketing in order to retain existing users, which has indeed greatly improved the user's sense of gain. For those users who are fed up with a certain operator, free flow itself is a manifestation of the sense of gain. From this perspective, the three major operators are all implementers of number portability, and the real winners are only users.