Orange France is predicted to increase not only its market share in its home market, but also its monthly ARPU levels over the next few years. Canada based IE Market Research Corp. (IEMR) is also expecting that SFR will see its subscriber market share decline from 34.2% in 2008 to 33.9% in 2013, while Bouygues Telecom's share of subscribers will remain stable over the next several years at approximately 16.6%.

"France is recovering from the global economic downturn, and its wireless market continues to expand. We have adjusted our subscriber forecasts for France's mobile operator space upward. We now forecast that the total number of subscriber accounts in the country will increase from 57.4 million in 2008 to 65.9 million (up from our previous estimate of 61.8 million) in 2013," said Nizar Assanie, Vice President (Research) at IEMR.

"Orange (France Telecom) will continue to be the largest operator. We expect that its subscriber base will increase from 25.2 million in 2008 to 29.1 million (up from our previous forecast of 25.7 million) in 2013."

"In terms of EBITDA margins, we think that profitability at Orange and SFR will decline over the next five years. Our model predicts that Orange's EBITDA margin will fall from 37.3% to 33.1% and SFR's margin will fall from 38.9% to 33.6% over the forecast period, 2008 - 2013. On the other hand, we forecast that Bouygues Telecom's EBITDA margin will improve from 28.5% in 2008 to 31.2% in 2013," said Mr. Assanie.

Although ARPU levels continue to decline in many wireless markets around the world, they expect that ARPUs in France will be stable over the next several years.

Their model forecasts that Orange's monthly ARPU will increase slightly from EUR33.19 in 2008 to EUR34.04 in 2013 while monthly ARPU at SFR declines from EUR36.04 in 2008 to EUR33.89 in 2013. Bouygues Telecom's ARPU level continues to be higher than the other operators' ARPU levels. Bouygues Telecom's monthly ARPU will be approximately EUR41.88 from 2009 to 2013.