The competition between Vivo and TIM for the leadership in postpaid growth
With users increasing their data consumption, abandoning the second chip and migrating from prepaid to control plans, conquer postpaid clients became the main goal for TIM, which was the leader in this segment in 1Q17.
Vivo, postpaid leader holding 42.2% of the market share, reacted and led growth in April with net adds reaching 241 thousand postpaid accesses against 115 thousand registered by TIM.
However, postpaid market can be better analyzed if we exclude M2M chips used in IoT solutions whose ARPU (R$ 3.00) is smaller than postpaid smartphones ARPU (R$ 50,00). It is in fact two distinct markets.
Vivo led postpaid net adds without M2M in April (154 thousand), but it had a smaller margin in relation to TIM (117 thousand). Vivo was the M2M net adds leader in April (87 thousand) while TIM presented negative net adds in the segment (-2 thousand).
TIM is still the leader in the accumulated of the year, though, with net adds of 509 thousand postpaid accesses (without M2M), followed by Vivo (323 thousand).
The competition for this market will be even more intense in the coming months. Claro, which led postpaid growth without M2M in 2016, didn't manage to repeat the same performance in 2017 yet.
Vivo also led total mobile net adds from January to April 2017 because it had less losses in prepaid in comparison with TIM. Vivo lost 379 thousand prepaid accesses in this period and TIM lost 2.6 million.
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