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

The company employs around 5,000 people in the region and recently announced it was seeking to recruit 500 more at its three 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 further boosted by a 2% improvement in the average revenue generated by each user at £252 in the year to June 30.

Deputy chief executive Graham Howe said he was encouraged by the latest figures: "This is another strong set of results from Orange."

Across the group, turnover for the first half of the year rose 13.8% to 8.1 billion euros (£5.1 billion), with customer numbers up 2.1 million at 41.1 million.

Orange, which is majority owned by France Telecom, saw its share price improve 9% following the revenues update yesterday.

The overall improvement was also helped by the addition of 802,000 new customers in France, with Orange's market share now at 49.3%.

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% in June 2001 to 31% at the end of last month.

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

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