Mobile market share in Switzerland
At the end of 2022 Swisscom had 6,173,000 mobile telephony customers in Switzerland, just 0.1% or a total of 4,000 fewer than in 2021. It gained 166,000 contract customers (postpaid offers) but lost 170,000 prepaid customers. Sunrise recorded strong growth of 6% over the same period. The operator had 2,766,000 mobile customers at the end of 2022. It won 173,000 customers in the postpaid segment, while losing 17,000 in the prepaid segment. The number of Salt customers increased to 1,883,000 (+4.1%). The operator added some 107,000 postpaid contracts during the year, but at the same time lost 33,000 customers in the prepaid segment. The data available to us indicate that Swisscom had a market share of around 57% at the end of 2022, while Sunrise occupied 25% and Salt 17%. The market share of other cable network operators remained relatively low at less than 1%.
For over ten years now users of prepaid offers have increasingly been switching to contracts. Indeed, the market dynamic is being driven largely by this market segment, with the proportion of customers with contracts rising from 60% in 2012 to 83% in 2022. The proportion of contract customers has continued to rise at each of the three network operators in recent months, and now stands at 84.1% at Sunrise, 83.4% at Swisscom and 78.8% at Salt.
Together they gained more than 440,000 additional postpaid contract customers in total in 2022. In this segment around 57% of the market fell to Swisscom, 26% to Sunrise, 16% to Salt and less than 1% to other cable network operators.
* The method used to count their prepaid customers differs between operators: Sunrise uses the 3-month rule, while Swisscom and Salt use the 12-month rule. This method takes into account prepaid customers with an active SIM card who have made at least one inbound or outbound connection to the network in the last three or twelve months.
Last modification 30.05.2023