In the nine months running up to the 30th September 2010 mobile network provider O2 said that it has seen its revenue rise by 5.6 percent to £4.51bn and has attributed this to the increased demand for smartphone devices.

The recent improvements in revenue from its operation in the UK were due to “improvement in mobile service revenue and the success of handset sales”, showing the rise in demand for the latest smartphone devices according to O2’s parent group, Telefonica.

In total the first nine months of 2010 saw a year-on-year increase in mobile service revenues of 4.9 percent to £4.12bn. The demand for new smartphones played a significant role in making up this revenue with almost 40 percent of it accounted for by data revenue.

In an effort to reduce a rising number of disconnections O2 also advised that its campaigns for its prepaid services had been successful in helping to lower these numbers. It called its pre-pay customer additions a “positive evolution” with a reported 115 000 new customers joining during the third quarter of 2010.

With a third of pay as you go mobile handsets purchased during the approach to Christmas the latest increase comes as all the mobile network operators in the UK begin to increase their marketing activity in the pay as you go area.

With 352 000 new customers added in the third quarter of this year, which is an increase of 4.8 percent year-on-year, O2 has reported that is has a total of  22 million customers. Of this customer base around 47 percent of them are currently contract customers. With a total of 0.7 million customers O2 has also seen an increase in its retail broadband service by 25.9 percent year-on-year.

Source – Marketing Week