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Research firm says U.K. telco’s market share dropped 4.4 percentage points in final three months of 2015.
TalkTalk lost market share in the final quarter of 2015 due in part to the damaging cyberattack it suffered in October.
According to Kantar Worldpanel ComTech, the U.K. quad-play provider saw its market share slip 4.4 percentage points to 9% in the three months ended 31 December. By comparison, incumbent telco BT grew its share by 2.4 percentage points to 28.6% (see table). Meanwhile, Virgin Media’s market share edged up to 11.1%, while Sky’s fell to 28.3% from 30.2%.
"Customers have lost faith in TalkTalk as a trustworthy brand," claimed Imran Choudhary, consumer insight director at Kantar Worldpanel, in a statement.
"There can be no doubt that it lost potential customers following the major data hack," he said. "If it’s to recover from recent events TalkTalk will need to offer more than just good value."
TalkTalk fell victim to what it called a significant and sustained cyberattack in October. Initially it was thought that the names, addresses, date of birth, contact details, account information and bank information of all 4 million of its customers were potentially accessed.
It later emerged that 156,959 customers had been compromised, 15,656 of whom had their bank account numbers and sort codes accessed, while 28,000 partial credit or debit card numbers were also accessed.
While far fewer customers were affected than originally feared, the hack is expected to cost TalkTalk £30 million-£35 million. The charges consist of the cost of communicating with affected customers, internal and external IT costs, revenue lost while TalkTalk’s Websites were offline, an uptick in churn, and the estimated cost of offering every customer a choice of free upgrades.
