The largest mobile communications provider is Orange, a French company that held a 37% share (in terms of revenue) of the mobile market in the first quarter of 2021, but has been gradually losing market share, from 45% in 2016. Orange reported 2.5m active mobile subscribers as of June 2021 (including 277,000 machine-to-machine subscribers, M2M), as it cleaned 224,000 inactive customers at the end of 2020.
In May 2021 Orange launched its commercial 5G network in some districts of two cities. The firm works with Nokia and reported an investment of €144m over the past three years to modernize its network in preparation for 5G. Orange claimed that its 5G network offered real 5G speeds as it used a dedicated 3.5-GHz spectrum. The Orange network supports 11 smartphone models. Internet use, notably broadband, has grown rapidly in recent years. The annual growth rate for internet subscriptions was 32% in the ten years to 2010 but slowed to 6.3% in the following decade. The number of subscriptions rose from 100,000 in 2001 to 1.7m in 2020. Although this is expected to rise further, to 1.8m in 2025, the rate of growth is slowing and is expected to average 1.5% a year in 2021-25. Samsung (South Korea), Xiaomi (China), and Apple (US) have a strong presence in the smartphone market. Motorola (owned by Lenovo, China) had about a 15% market share in Slovakia in the fourth quarter of 2020—the best in Europe, according to IDC. Wearables and virtual-reality products have been gaining popularity.