About 1.22 million Portuguese have more than one mobile phone card

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Close to 1.22 million Portuguese people have more than one mobile phone card, which makes up a total of 16.3 percent of individuals who have this type of equipment in Portugal over the age of 9, Marktest reported. The figures obtained by the market research company do not, however, show whether the plurality of cards refers to the use of different networks.

Data collected by the market research firm show that, over the October mobile quarter of this year, around 84 percent of respondents who own a mobile phone said they held only one SIM card, while 13.2 percent responded having two cards and 2.5 percent reported having three. On the other hand, the percentage of users who claimed to have more than three cards was fixed at 0.6 percentage points.

The distribution by sex shows that it is among men that the penetration rate of cards assumes higher values, with the Barómetro de Telecomunicações (Telecommunications Barometer) accounting for 20.1 percent of the responses while among women only 12.5 percent claim to have more than one SIM.

In the «age group» variable, young people stand out, with 24.8 percent of individuals aged between 25 and 34 years old reporting having more than one mobile phone card. Young people aged 15 to 24, under the same conditions, accounted for 23 percent of affirmative responses.

Marktest found that the North Interior is the region with the highest concentration of individuals with mobile phones with more than one SIM (19.6 percent), followed by Litoral Centro (17.4 percent) and Greater Lisbon (17.3 percent) percent). On the other hand, the islands occupy the bottom of the table, with 8.6 percent of affirmative responses.

Regarding the distribution by social class, the figures show that the penetration rate of several cards, per individual with a mobile phone, is higher in the highest levels – 19.2 percent in the middle class and 18.5 percent in the upper class.

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