Early signs are of a strong close to 2007, with mobile phone sales in the final week climbing to almost 1 million.
Soon to be published figures from GfK will show that 910,000 phones were sold in the the week before Christmas. This number was not only well up on the previous year, but continued a trend over the previous couple of weeks.
But how profitable and long term this business proves to be remains to be seen. The market was driven by cheap prepay offers, which helped propel pay as you go deals to 667,000 in December's final week.
As Mobile has highlighted in
DealWatch
some of these deals saw handsets retailing for well below the average wholesale price across Europe, as measured in
GSME's Handset Trading
data.
Advertising by mobile companies generally quietned off towards the end of the year as killer deals had done their work of attracting footfall to the high street.