Hispanic Market bucks National Postpaid Trend Sector

The Hispanic market’s affinity towards wireless prepaid services is keeping the prepaid segment growing among Hispanics, according to Eric Fogle, CEO of ShareTracker, the largest U.S. market research company dedicated to telecom market share and flow share measurement products and analytics.

Across the 10 largest Hispanic markets, ShareTracker data reports a six percent increase in Hispanic prepaid voice-only net adds from 2013 to 2014.*

Without the Hispanic segment subscriptions, the prepaid market would have experienced a contraction. During this same time, Hispanics also saw a 274 percent decrease of postpaid net adds.

Fogle said the trend is driven in part by mobile virtual network operators (MNVO) targeting the Hispanic market with pricing offers and customer incentives.

However, ShareTracker data shows a broad range share of prepaid and postpaid service subscriptions in three key Hispanic markets, Los Angeles, New York and Miami. For example, in 4Q of 2014 Miami had a higher prepaid share than Los Angeles and New York.

“We’ve been tracking this data for two years and will maintain our longitudinal study of this trend in 2015,” said Fogle. “We will measure how the Hispanic market continues to react to telecom promotions as wireless carriers compete for their business in the prepaid space.”

*Top 10 Hispanic markets are based on total Hispanic population. These markets are Los Angeles, New York, Houston, Chicago, Dallas-Fort Worth, Miami, Phoenix, San Francisco, San Antonio, and Sacramento.