Research programme · Telecom & digital

Telecom.

A data-driven analysis of the Maldives telecommunications market — market structure, operator economics, prepaid product analytics, pricing, customer behaviour, forecasting and commercial strategy. The programme demonstrates how public data can be turned into an analytical framework for understanding customer growth, monetisation, retention, product performance and competitive positioning.

173 months of regulator data 204 published products 30 operator-quarters Methodology & sources →

+5.2%

Mobile subscriptions, 2025

Average base, year on year · CAM · OFFICIAL

+0.1%

Mobile service revenue, 2025

Both operators' filings · OWN-CALC

−4.9%

Revenue per subscription, 2025

MVR 325.61 a month · OWN-CALC

72%

Of the base is still prepaid

May 2026 · CAM · OFFICIAL

The finding this programme is built around. The Maldives mobile market grew its subscription base by 5.2% in 2025 and its mobile service revenue by 0.1%. Those two numbers can only both be true if revenue per subscription fell, and it did — by 4.9%. A market that adds customers while its unit revenue erodes has a monetisation problem, not an acquisition problem, and almost every commercial decision below follows from that distinction.

The route through

market → operators → customers → strategy

01 Market — How big is telecom in the Maldives, and is it still growing? 839,615 mobile subscriptions at May 2026 — 143.1% of residents, and still below the 907,763 peak of September 2017. A 173-month regulator series, rebuilt from source. 02 Competition — Who holds the market, and can that even be measured? Two licensed operators, both listed, both filing quarterly. Their own customer counts are not defined the same way and cannot be turned into market shares — a limit this programme states rather than works around. 03 Economics — Where does the revenue and the profit come from? MVR 5,054m of combined revenue in 2025, 1.3% up on 2024, on quarterly income statements extracted from fifteen filings and validated against both operators' published annual totals. 04 Customers — Who is actually buying, and what are they worth? A resident base of roughly 590,000 people, a third of them foreign nationals, plus two million annual visitors passing through a market whose prepaid base rises and falls with the tourist season. 05 Prepaid — How does prepaid economics actually work here? 604,548 prepaid subscriptions, 72% of the base — down from 88% in 2016 and steady since 2022. The structural migration to postpaid has stopped. 06 Products — What is being sold, and at what implied unit price? 204 published products, from a MVR 10 one-hour pass to a MVR 2,026 annual plan, normalised onto price per day and price per gigabyte. 07 Pricing — What would it take to price this properly? Elasticity cannot be estimated from public data — so the pricing work here builds the estimator, states the assumption, and shows what changes when the assumption moves. 08 Retention — Why might customers leave, and who should be kept? Neither operator publishes churn. The framework is built and demonstrated on a simulated base, clearly labelled, because the alternative is inventing a finding. 09 Forecast — Where does the market go over five years? Five candidate models, rolling-origin backtests, and an uncomfortable answer: a straight line beats SARIMA and Holt-Winters on every series. 10 Strategy — So what should an operator do about it? Subscriptions grew 5.2% in 2025 and mobile revenue 0.1%. Whatever else is true, this is not a market where the binding constraint is acquisition.

Fourteen years of the market

Full dashboard →

Mobile subscriptions have not recovered their 2017 peak

Total, prepaid and postpaid mobile subscriptions, monthly

Total Prepaid Postpaid

Communications Authority of Maldives, monthly telecom statistics. February 2012's published total is a transcription error and is excluded.

The prepaid share fell for five years, then stopped

Prepaid as a share of mobile subscriptions, %

Communications Authority of Maldives. The migration to postpaid ran from 2017 to 2022 and has been flat since.

What a commercial function watches

the flagship framework

The commercial control tower

Prepaid business performance, decomposed into the seven things a commercial function measures and the seven decisions those measurements exist to drive. Select a branch to see which of its metrics the public record can actually supply.

14 of 34 metrics public

Decisions informed by monetisation

AcquireRetainUpsellRepriceLaunchConsolidateRetire

What is each subscription worth, and is that rising?

This is where the market’s problem shows. Revenue per subscription fell 4.9% in 2025 while the base grew 5.2%. A commercial team would immediately want the recharge distribution behind that — and nobody outside the operators has it.

Monetisation metrics and their availability
Metric	Current reading	Available from
Revenue per subscription	MVR 325.61	public record
Mobile service revenue	MVR 3160m	public record
Recharge frequency	—	operator data only
Average recharge value	—	operator data only
Prepaid vs postpaid ARPU	—	operator data only

Readings as at 2026-05 (market) and full-year 2025 (financial). The split between what is public and what is not is the honest shape of this project: roughly a third of what a commercial team watches can be reconstructed from outside, the rest can only be framed.

The programme

Dashboard

Market, operators and forecast

The full market series, the two operators side by side on a consistent basis, and a five-year projection with its backtest.

Products

Portfolio and price benchmark

204 published products, normalised onto price per day and price per gigabyte, with the reason that second metric is a trap.

Models

Pricing, churn, lifetime value

Scenario engines for revenue, elasticity, customer value, retention targeting and promotion incrementality — every assumption exposed.

Case studies

Five commercial decisions

The questions a telecom commercial analyst is actually asked, worked through with the decomposition each one needs.

Decisions

What should management do?

Observed, inferred and recommended — kept strictly apart, because the difference between them is the whole discipline.

Methodology

Sources, models and limits

Every dataset, its retrieval date and its known problems; every model, its assumptions and why it was chosen.

Publications

Paper · Infrastructure

The market that stopped growing in 2017

The Maldives has 839,615 mobile subscriptions and 143 of them for every hundred residents — and it is still 7% below where it was nine years ago. The base has been growing again since 2022, but the revenue it carries has not. Reconstructed from 173 months of regulator data and thirty operator-quarters of filings.

Paper · Business & Markets

What a gigabyte actually costs in the Maldives

Two hundred and four published products, and a price ladder that varies forty-six-fold within a single duration band. The cheapest data in the country on headline arithmetic is a one-hour pass at twenty laari a gigabyte — which nobody can use. Once consumption is capped at something a person could plausibly consume, the ordering inverts and the same pack becomes the most expensive data on sale.

Case study · Business & Markets

Can you run a telecom commercial function on public data?

We rebuilt as much of a telecom operator's commercial analytics function as the public record allows — market sizing, operator economics, product portfolio, pricing, forecasting and decision support — and then counted what was missing. About a third of what a commercial team watches can be reconstructed from outside. The third that cannot includes churn, which is why the answer is a qualified no, and why the qualification is the useful part.