There have been not one, but two mergers of major mobile operators approved in Taiwan. The Taiwanese regulator National Communications Commission (NCC) has announced conditional approval of FarEasTone’s acquisition of Asia Pacific Telecom (GT) and Taiwan Mobile’s acquisition of Taiwan Star (T Star). This will bring Taiwan’s market from five national operators down to just three. Notably this will allow both FarEasTone and Taiwan Mobile to challenge the market share of rival Chunghwa, providing more even competition between the Taiwanese operators.
In this new analysis we examine the pre-merger regional results for each of the four operators; using key mobile experience metrics to get a picture of how the separate companies measured up to one another — this allows us to see the potential for positive change that the to-be-merged networks have. The two larger acquiring operators — FarEasTone and Taiwan Mobile — outperform the smaller acquired operators — GT and T Star — in almost all metrics across all the analyzed regions. The gap is most notable for Download Speed Experience, where FarEasTone and Taiwan Mobile are around 60% faster than their counterparts.
Availability shows a trend that becomes a pattern when looking at the entities involved in the separate mergers. The smaller operators that are merging with the larger operators place lower in the key metrics examined. GT consistently scores lower than FarEasTone for Availability across all regions — 1.4 percentage points when averaged over the Central, Northern and Southern regions. The same is true for T Star when comparing it against Taiwan Mobile, although the average difference across regions is only 0.5 percentage points in this case. The higher scores for the larger operators hopefully indicate that the smaller operators’ user bases will see improvements in Availability, as their networks are integrated with those of their larger counterparts.
Opensignal recently analyzed Coverage Experience globally and in Taiwan. Taiwan Mobile scored higher than T-Star on overall Coverage Experience (8 compared with 6.8 on a ten-point scale, respectively). Similarly, FarEasTone has much higher scores for overall Coverage Experience (8.1 versus 5.3 respectively). In both cases, the combined companies will aim to offer the better level of coverage to existing users of both networks.
Looking at Download Speed Experience, we see a stark difference between the merged entities. FarEasTone’s speeds are well above those of GT — our FarEasTone users observe download speeds that on average are 21.8Mbps (61.2%) faster than GT users’ speeds across the reported regions. For these two merging operators, the Southern region has the largest gap — 23.4Mbps (67.8%). The story is similar for Taiwan Mobile, the operator’s speeds outpace those of T Star by an average of 18.5Mbps (63.2%) across all regions. Likewise, the Southern region is where the difference is greatest — 19.7Mbps (68%).
The difference in Games Experience is less pronounced than that for Download Speed Experience, but the same pattern is present. The smaller operators of the two mergers — GT and T Star — score consistently lower than the companies they are being merged with. On average, FarEasTone scores 6.9 points (9.6%) above GT across all regions — FarEasTone placing a whole category above GT for the level of user experience, in the Good (75-85) category. Taiwan Mobile also outscores T Star in all three regions. The operator averages an 8.5-point (12%) lead over T Star, again placing the user experience in different categories of Good (75-85) and Fair (65-75), respectively.
Video Experience doesn’t provide as much variation between the operators in the respective mergers. Taking into account the average differences across the regions, the GT-FarEasTone merger has a 5.3-point (8.2%) gap, while the T Star-Taiwan Mobile merger is closer at a 3.9-point (5.8%) lead for Taiwan Mobile. Both mergers have the larger operators narrowly placing in the Very Good (68-78) category, while the smaller operators hover just below the threshold.
There is room for improvement
In the case of both mergers there is plenty of room for improvement. The smaller operators in each merger score significantly lower than their larger partners in mobile experience, indicating the potential for future improvement. The mergers will give FarEasTone and Taiwan Mobile increased economies of scale due to their expanded market share, which they hope will allow them to better challenge Chunghwa.
Mergers can take a while to have an effect, with integration happening slowly. There’s also always risk of network integration causing short term reliability issues for existing users of one or both networks.
After approval by the NCC and the Fair Trade Commission (FTC) each set of merged companies will initially operate as separate brands, slowly combining infrastructure and upgrading both networks to work together. Companies aim to bring underperforming aspects in line with areas that perform well. Recently Opensignal published an analysis on the Italian merger of Wind and 3 into WindTre. Opensignal’s analysis found that while neither operator won many awards pre-merger, combined they started being a serious player in the Italian market — achieving greater scores than they did separately.
Opensignal will continue to follow the progress of these mergers, and the Taiwanese mobile experience in general, in our mobile network experience reports, which we publish regularly.
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