Mobile Market Report 2025 (SIM + Devices)

Choice, Churn, and the Rise of Plan-Level Competition

Executive Summary

By December 2025, the Saudi mobile market had become one of the most competitive, behaviourally engineered consumer markets in the region. What once looked like a straightforward choice between a few large operators is now a dense ecosystem of 399 live SIM deals across 10 providers, spanning prepaid and postpaid, micro-duration and annual, entry-level and premium.

The defining shift is structural: competition now happens at the plan level, not the provider level. Providers are no longer simply “selling SIMs”; they are running continuously iterated portfolios designed for monthly re-evaluation, controlled churn, and frequent reactivation.

This market is now too complex for manual comparison, and that complexity is not accidental—it is a feature of modern telecom pricing and segmentation. Platforms that translate market chaos into clarity increasingly become part of the ecosystem infrastructure.

Market Snapshot:

• 399 live SIM deals 

• 10 providers actively competing

• Market concentration is high:

  • Top provider: 29.8% of all deals (119)

  • Top 3 providers: 57.6% of all deals

  • Top 5 providers: 72.9% of all deals

• Prepaid vs postpaid: 335 prepaid (84%) vs 64 postpaid (16%)

• Contract structure: 63% of plans run on a 28–30 day cycle

• Micro-duration plans are meaningful:

  • 10.8% of plans are ≤ 3 days

  • 8.8% are 7-day plans

  • 8.8% are 90-day plans

• Price dispersion is extreme: SAR 2.29 → SAR 2,861 (median ~SAR 120)

• Normalised monthly pricing shows postpaid carries a ~48% premium vs prepaid.

What the Market Looks Like in 2025

1) SIM competition is now portfolio warfare

The number of offers has become the battleground. A small number of brands are responsible for the majority of SKU inflation, experimentation, and market noise. The result is a market where visibility, clarity, and offer architecture are as important as network performance.

2) Prepaid has become the market default

Prepaid is no longer the “entry-level” option. It is the core market format where providers test price points, segment behaviours, and run short-duration offers to win attention. Prepaid is where the market learns fastest.

3) Postpaid is a premium product, not the default

Postpaid has quietly repositioned itself as a convenience-led tier: fewer offers, more consistency, more bundling, more perceived stability. The pricing premium exists because users are paying for simplicity and reduced cognitive effort—not just data.

4) The market is subscription-like (without being called a subscription)

The dominance of 28–30 day cycles is not a coincidence; it creates a predictable cadence of renewal and switching. Saudi SIMs are not calendar monthly—they are billing engineered monthly. That rhythm increases repeat decision-making, which increases market churn and offer velocity.

5) “Unlimited” has become a psychological anchor

“Unlimited” is often a framing layer rather than a technical promise, frequently paired with fair-usage policies or throttling. Consumers struggle to compare plans because terminology is inconsistent and the real constraints are buried in the details.

The Hidden Economic Model: Churn + Reactivation

Saudi SIM economics increasingly assume customers will leave. Many plans are structured to expire, reset, and re-attract users rather than to keep them indefinitely. The presence of meaningful weekly and ultra-short plans supports this: churn isn’t a failure; it’s a designed mechanism.

This creates a market where retention is less important than reactivation—winning the consumer back repeatedly through structured offers, short-term incentives, and behavioural packaging.

Device Market Add-on: What Mobile Hardware Reveals

Your device insights reinforce the same story: devices are not “catalogue markets,” they are hit-driven premium shelves. The data you shared suggests:

• The device market is premium-skewed (median ~SAR 4,799)

• Apple dominates deal presence; Samsung is the second pillar

• Providers compete on how they package the same hero models, not on breadth of models

• Installments and bundles are the real postpaid defense mechanism long-term

Strategic consequence: devices are a retention tool; SIMs are a churn tool.

What This Means

For consumers

Choice is abundant but cognitively overwhelming. Without structure, users either overpay, choose based on misleading “unlimited” terms, or default to inertia.

For providers

Winning requires portfolio strategy: segmentation, clarity, and offer architecture matter more than pure pricing. SKU redundancy and internal cannibalisation become real risks without intelligence.