Claro to spend USD450m in 2013

Mexican mobile giant America Movil (AM) plans to invest USD450 million in its Argentine unit Claro next year, in a bid to expand and modernise the cellco’s network infrastructure across the country. Dow Jones Newswires cites a statement from Claro as saying that today around 40% of its roughly 20 million customers use their mobile phones to connect to the internet on a daily basis. As such, Claro said it is ‘necessary to keep investing to improve the network and let all those people be connected without interruptions.’ Claro is Argentina’s largest mobile operator by subscribers, according to TeleGeography’s GlobalComms Database, with around 19.78 million subscribers at the end of June 2012 (a market share of 34.8%), followed by Telecom Personal (the mobile unit of Telecom Argentina) with 18.72 million, Telefonica-owned Movistar with 16.74 million and Nextel Argentina, a subsidiary of NII Holdings, with 1.59 million customers.