UAE's mobile population continues to surge, but how does its overall penetration fare?

The National's favourite mono-syllabic UAE telecom operator announced their third-quarter earnings this morning (the story is here).

The financial numbers are impressive, to say the least (an almost 400 per cent gain in year-over-year profit, for example), but the interesting stat that really grabs your eye is how many new subscribers du signed up in the quarter.

More than 233,000 SIM cards were registered to du in the past quarter, while its main rival Etisalat, lodged another 180,000 new subscribers. Doing the quick math, that means that more than 400,000 mobile users registered connections in the past three months, despite the tail-end effects from a recession, the sweltering heat of the summer and the Ramadan holiday period.

Impressive, no? Keeping the calculator handy, there are now more than 10.6 million mobile subscribers in the region. Assuming that the population of the UAE is about six million (as estimated by this Gulf News article but official numbers may vary), the country's mobile penetration rate is about 176 per cent, far short of the 211 per cent this research report estimated.