MOBILE phone group Orange yesterday drew encouragement from figures showing it had added 415,000 UK customers in the first six months of the year.

The company employs about 5,000 people in the region and recently announced it was seeking to recruit 500 more at its communications centres in Darlington, Peterlee and North Tyneside.

Orange said it had strengthened its market leading position in the UK by taking its number of active users to 12.8 million by the end of June.

The company was also boosted by a two per cent improvement in the average revenue generated by each user, at £252 in the year to June 30.

Across the group, turnover for the first half of the year rose 13.8 per cent to £5.1bn, with customer numbers up 2.1 million at 41.1 million.

Orange, which is majority owned by France Telecom, saw its share price improve nine per cent following the revenues update yesterday.

The overall improvement was helped by the addition of 802,000 customers in France, where Orange's market share is now at 49.3 per cent.

In both countries, Orange has seen its number of contract customers rise as it attempts to capture greater revenues from its users, including from the next generation of mobile phones.

The proportion of contract customers in the UK increased from 28.6 per cent in June 2001 to 31 per cent at the end of last month.

The company said demand for text messaging remained strong and contributed to almost 14 per cent of network revenues in the first half of the year, compared with 9.6 per cent in the first half of last year.

A company spokeswoman said the quality of staff employed in the North-East was responsible for a "great deal" of the company's success.