Henrik Poulsen, the chief executive of Denmark’s incumbent telecoms operator TDC, has said the company may have to increase investment in its wireless infrastructure in order to stay ahead of its main rivals TeliaSonera and Telenor. ‘There could be a situation whereby for a period of time we would have to accelerate our mobile investments to make sure we maintain the leading mobile infrastructure in Denmark,’ Dow Jones Newswires quoted Poulsen as saying at the Morgan Stanley TMT Summit in Barcelona, adding: ‘Therefore, I don’t want to create any expectation that our capex-to-revenue ratio is coming down.’ The executive’s comments follow the signing of an agreement between TDC’s main competitors, Telenor Denmark and Telia Denmark, to operate a shared mobile network – involving 2G, 3G and 4G LTE infrastructure – in June 2011. The agreement will give each other access to existing towers in areas where they would otherwise have had to build their own. They will also jointly build new mobile towers to help reduce spending on mobile infrastructure, while at the same time enabling them to expand the joint network more quickly.
TeleGeography’s GlobalComms Database states that TDC was Denmark’s largest mobile operator by subscribers at the end of June 2011, with a market share of 42.9%, ahead of Telenor Denmark, the local unit of Norwegian telecoms group Telenor, with 27.7% and TeliaSonera’s Telia Denmark, which held around 20% of the market. A fourth operator, Hi3G Access Denmark (3), had a market share of around 9.4% at the same date.