Claro grew, though it posed no threat to Vivo's leadership in 2009
In 2008, Claro reached the second position in the Brazilian market share, surpassing Tim. Based on Claro's performance in the last two years, we could expect that the company would, in 2009, get close to Vivo, to take the leadership in Brazil.
Claro overcame Vivo in net adds in 4 of the 10 first months of 2009. However, in those 6 months in which Vivo surpassed Claro, it increased from 6.3 mobile accesses in Dec/2008 to 6.8 million mobile accesses in Oct/09.
Claro, which led mobile growth in 2007 and 2008, didn't repeat this performance in 2009. Its net adds (4.0 millions) were lower than the ones presented by Vivo (4.6 millions) and Oi (5.2 millions).
Claro is the operator holding the lowest prepaid percentage in its base (79.7%), but its ARPU remained stable in R$ 23.00 in 2009, inferior than Tim's (R$ 26.5) and Vivo's (R$ 26.4). This is one of the reasons why Claro, even having a larger clients base, didn't surpass Tim yet, so reaching the 2nd position also in net revenue.
One of Vivo's advantage over Claro is the monthly churn (average of 2.5% in 3Q09) while Claro's churn reached 2.9%.
Vivo and Claro have investments in 3G and they get the majority of their clients covered by this technology.
Claro's EBITDA margin accumulated in the first 9 months of 2009 (24.1%) was lower than the value gotten in the same period of 2008 (25.0%).
Summarizing, for Claro 2009 has being a year for consolidate its second position in market share reached in 2008. The operator presented performance close to Vivo's, but slightly inferior in the majority of the indicators followed by Teleco (more details). Among those, are included quality indexes and EBITDA margin.
One possible interpretation would be, after two years, Vivo responded to the threat posed by the company in the second position and now Claro will have to develop a new strategy to conquer leadership. There is no doubt that for Claro there is a new challenge for 2010.
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