In the mass market, convergence – or sales of mobile and fixed-line service bundles – remains the key to value creation.
It addresses household telecommunication needs in a comprehensive manner, increasing customer satisfaction and reducing churn. And it allows us to upsell more services, winning a higher share of household media and telecom budgets.
Orange Love – a proven track record
We have already bet on convergence in 2017 introducing Orange Love as our flagship offer for Polish households. The Orange Love offer is a predefined set of fixed and mobile services, bundled together and sold at an attractive fixed price. The basic package can be extended with extra fees for additional SIM cards, higher fibre-broadband speed and additional TV content. On top of that we offer a wide range of smartphones at attractive prices. Importantly, Orange Love is available on any broadband technology (fibre and copper), and also on LTE positioned as home broadband. This allows us to market this offer all over the country, which is very efficient. By the end of 2022, Orange Love had attracted more than 1.6 million customers.
More potential in convergence
The Polish market is becoming increasingly convergent, similar to some other EU markets, but we continue to see significant potential to both upselling additional services to households where we are already present and reaching new households with our services. Our ambition is to expand our convergent customer base by at least 20% above our 2020 base by the end of 2024, while achieving a further significant increase in ARPO.
Other operators are also increasingly in pursuit of a convergence strategy based on fixed broadband, which results in increased competition. This requires us to differentiate with a comprehensive service offer and quality customer care. We will leverage the great power of our brand and our excellent image among customers, and will also attempt to address the needs of more price-sensitive customers.
Convergent customers growth fuelled by fibre expansion
ARPO growth driven by value strategy and upsell
Fibre – a key success factor
The main success factor to reach our convergent ambitions will be further expansion of our fibre reach. By 2024 we intend to increase it by 2–3 million households, or 40–60% compared to the end of 2020. Over the last few years we have heavily invested in fibre network rollout, establishing fibre as a synonym for fast and reliable internet in Poland, which has been reflected in Orange Polska’s perception as the internet provider of choice. In the coming years, we will rely more on wholesale access to the networks of other operators. These will be mainly the networks constructed by Światłowód Inwestycje (FiberCo) and those built within the Digital Poland Operational Programme (POPC). Fibre generates much higher average revenue per user compared to copper technologies. This can be attributed mainly to broader opportunities to sell content and to higher speeds, making these services better perceived by customers and an increasingly popular choice.
We will further significantly expand fibre reach (m households)
Fibre value creation
TV content – an important element of the convergent offer
An important factor in the success of our convergent strategy is also the quality of TV content, which is very important for Polish consumers when choosing a service provider. While demand for OTT content has grown rapidly, the linear TV offer continues to be very popular. We intend to remain a content reseller: our strategy does not foresee any investments in exclusive content. Our offer comprises more than 200 linear channels and we are increasingly promoting OTT content as well. Our TV customer base stood at around 950,000 at the end of 2022. More than 80% of that base accounts for IPTV technology. The customer base in this technology is growing strongly, driven by expansion of our fibre footprint. The remaining part accounts for satellite TV, which we consider a legacy technology and no longer develop.
Beyond connectivity – more services for households
Fixed and mobile connectivity will remain our main services, but we aim to explore and test other value-added services following a vision of the ‘extended home’. We want to reach customers with new offers that will make their everyday life easier thanks to modern technologies. We plan to add further elements to our convergent packages: cybersecurity services, smart devices, new possibilities of using digital entertainment and solutions related to the use of environmentally friendly, clean energy. Besides infrastructure, we have highly skilled technicians, sales representatives and sales network to install and advise our customers on those areas. Those assets give us unique positioning to develop and design new services.