Popularity of mobile phones

Orange has always had a strong and unique vision: a world of wire free communications where people can access whoever and whatever they want, wherever, whenever and however they want. The customer is central to this vision, and it's the customer who is the essence of the Orange brand. By delivering benefit and value to our customers, we create a business that delivers value to our shareholders. It is the vision and determination of Orange, which has delivered many remarkable achievements so far, and as we move further towards the ultimate vision, we see huge growth ahead for Orange, from three distinct sources in particular.

To ensure we achieve this potential, our approach is to concentrate on the fundamentals of our business and get them right: essentials such as network quality, customer service and value for money. We aim to be the best in all of these, to exceed our customers' expectations. Achieving this delivers greater customer satisfaction. Satisfied customers, getting real utility and benefit from our services, will use their Orange phone more, generate more revenue and be less inclined to switch to our competitors.

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Investing in the fundamentals also means that Orange is able to carry huge increases in traffic and customers, without degrading quality of service to the existing customer base. This is important, because the traffic carried on our networks will continue to grow strongly. The three distinct sources of this growth are traditional voice usage, usage of new (non-voice) services, and the third area, revenue and margin growth as we integrate our businesses and leverage the brand across our footprint.

Looking at traditional voice usage first.

We know that as mobile markets grow, an increasing proportion of total telecommunications traffic is carried on the mobile networks. We know that as mobile customers mature as users, their usage tends to increase, driven by the convenience and utility of the service. We also know that we can stimulate usage through enhancements to service functionality and segmented tariffing. For many of our customers, the Orange phone has now become their primary communications device. We believe that this trend will grow strongly.

In fact, the Orange phone will become more than a communications device: it will become the means through which our customers access and control their Orange 'life services'. These factors can all increase average usage and revenues. We have demonstrated this consistently on our UK contract base for a number of years. We believe that the trend will continue, and indeed widen to our prepay customers and to other markets as their respective maturity grows. Reflecting our unique confidence in this, our customers and our strategy, Orange believes that average voice revenues will be 5% higher in 2005 than they were in 2001.

Beyond this, we are working to further increase our market share, especially of the more valuable market segments. Even in markets that are almost fully penetrated, we see growth potential by winning customers from other operators. The re-branding will help this, supported as it is by a programme to ensure that the fundamentals of each Orange operation deliver the promises of the brand. Secondly, Orange expects substantial growth from the usage of new, non-voice services.

In some of our main markets, non-voice services (principally text messaging) already contribute well over 10% of network revenues, and usage is still growing strongly. Around 60% of our UK customers regularly use text messaging, mainly for person-to-person communication. In both France and the UK, we have leadership of the short message market. Usage is growing rapidly, and now widening to include other types of short message service, such as pre-registered information alerts and interactive applications with other media (such as television and radio).

However, Orange believes there is substantially more growth ahead, partly as usage of today's applications increases further, but more significantly, through the wide array of new services which will be progressively launched from mid 2002 onwards. Today's text and voice messaging will evolve to integrated and instant messaging. Chat rooms and buddy lists will stimulate growth in traffic. Personal, virtual, location-sensitive information services will encourage loyalty as well as usage. New services, such as multimedia messaging, will allow the transfer of pictures and photographs, sound and text.

Other services, often content-rich and delivered in conjunction with third parties, will combine the convenience of wire free with a wide range of day-to-day activities. They will facilitate shopping, banking and a host of other tasks, making our customers' lives easier. Orange has been working hard, pulling together all of the elements needed to deliver these services. A solid network, strong partners, intuitive customer interface, suitably packaged content and appropriate "handset" devices are all an essential part of delivering the vision.

From the middle of 2002, Orange will begin to roll out such new services, and they will evolve and develop thereafter. Wherever possible, this will be on a group wide basis, consistent across our footprint. It is more important though that all new services are fully ready, and live up to Orange standards, before they are launched. The customer experience is the most important determinant of ultimate success. By delivering services, which add real benefit to our customers, Orange believes that usage will develop steadily, building the associated revenues towards our target of non-voice services contributing 25% of network revenues by 2005.

And thirdly, as we integrate our operations under the Orange brand, philosophy and vision, we believe that we can leverage even greater benefits. Learning from each other, sharing development work and striving to bring each operator up to the level of best practice is true integration, and our top operational priority. We believe it will deliver substantial shareholder value. The ultimate vision is a long-term one, but the path is evolutionary. In the ways outlined above, there are many steps from where we are today, and all the evidence and experience to date supports the strong belief we have.