Orange Customer Base Passes 6 Million - Company Business and Marketing

Cambridge Telcom Report, April 10, 2000

Orange Wednesday announced that it added a Q1 record of 1.08 million net new customers in the first three months of 2000, a market share of over 33%. For the second quarter in succession, Orange was the fastest growing operator, reflecting the all-round strength of the Orange product and quality of service. The Q1 growth was three times that achieved in the same period last year.

This brought the Orange customer base to over 5.97 million at the end of the quarter, a growth of almost two and a half times over the past year, since the end of Q1 1999. Since March 31st, the customer base has grown past the six million level.

Of the growth, Orange added over 100,000 net new contract customers, 280% of the total market growth in that sector. Of these, 66,000 were on the Everyday 50 product which has been very successful at attracting customers and usage from the fixed line networks. There are now 425,000 ED50 customers, and 2.55 million contract customers overall.

The new Orange Just Talk prepay tariff, which was launched in October last year, attracted 0.977 million new customers, taking the Orange prepay base to 3.42 million.

Overall churn improved further, falling from 15.8% for the year to December 31st to 14.6% for the twelve months to March 31st. Within this, contract churn improved slightly to 20.6%, while prepay churn improved 0.6% to 8.2%.

Commenting, Hans Snook, Chief Executive Officer said, "This year has continued the trend of accelerated growth set last year, reflecting the investments we have made in the network and customer service, and the competitiveness of our tariffs.

"Orange accelerated growth reflects the market leading quality of our products, service, network and innovation. These deliver clear and differentiated benefits for our customers and provide the best platform for the delivery of the new WAP, video and internet based services.

"It also shows that management has not been distracted by the corporate activity in which we have been involved. This year, Orange will continue it's proven track record of innovation, building on its delivery of WAP technology, with developments in wirefree video, internet services and voice recognition. The future's bright.... The future's Orange"

-- Orange provides a broad range of personal communications services. As well as Orange GSM 1800 services, this includes other digital cellular telephone and paging services.

-- As at April 4, 2000, Orange had over 6 million customers.

-- Orange provides high quality coverage to 99% of the UK population and over 80% of the geographic area. Coverage is based on hand portable, unlike some other operators which choose to base their coverage on boosted car kits.

-- Orange is the largest and fastest-growing digital mobile phone network in the UK, with over 6,600 base stations, and more than 10,000 sites targeted by 2001.

-- In October 1999, OFTEL, the UK's telecommunications industry regulator, published the results of surveys carried out by the four UK GSM mobile communications networks to assess their relative performance. Orange was shown to be the best performing network, with an average call success rate of 97.3%.

-- In November 1999, the Consumers' Association's Which? magazine published a survey of its members and concluded: "Orange was easily the best all round. It consistently came first, or very near the top, for both the quality of its network and customer service."

-- Orange was the first network operator to introduce Enhanced Full Rate in February 1998. EFR provides fixed line call quality across the entire Orange network to all customers at no extra charge.

-- Orange now offers roaming on 194 networks in 93 countries.