Mobile markets in Ghana and Gabon looking healthy despite slowing subscriber numbers

Thursday, 31 March 2011 15:48  |  James Barton

Two West African countries are the focus of recent market reports, and encouragingly both have healthy mobile sectors.

Despite a slowdown in subscriber numbers, healthy competition in Ghana should keep tariffs down and drive growth, according to 2010 market reports from BMI.

While the first six months of 2010 saw a rise of 7.3% in Ghana’s mobile subscriber figures, this increase began to slow in the third quarter, with a rise of 5.8% taking the figure to 16.238m. The decline in new subscriptions resulted from net losses reported in Q310 as a result of SIM registration, which was introduced on July 1 2010. There were 237,000 net losses in the quarter.

Research firm BMI has predicted that Ghana’s market will expand by 5% in 2010, raising penetration to just over 66% by the year’s end. The prediction is based on data published by the country’s leading mobile network operators, among them MTN Ghana, a subsidiary of South Africa’s MTN, and Tigo Ghana, which is owned by Millicom International Cellular.

Although growth in Ghana is likely to be slower in 2010, MTN, Zain Ghana and Vodafone have all heavily reduced their prepaid tariffs, which should lead to stronger customer growth. While both Zain and Vodafone already offered the market's lowest tariffs at GHS8 per minute, MTN announced at the end of October 2010 that it was cutting its prepaid tariff in half to undercut the competition and offer it at GHS7 per minute. Furthermore, it is expected that Glo Mobile Ghana will launch mobile services before the end of the year.

Across the Gulf of Guinea, Gabon’s flourishing mobile market belies the fact that its fixed-line and broadband sectors have been largely monopolised, according to new information from Research and Markets.

Gabon's oil revenues make it one of the wealthiest nations in Africa. GDP per capita is well above the African average, although a distorted income distribution and poor social indicators are evident. The telecom market was liberalised in 1999 when the government awarded three mobile telephony licences and two Internet Service Provider (ISP) licences and established an independent regulatory authority. Following two unsuccessful attempts, the privatisation of Gabon Telecom finally succeeded in 2007 when Vivendi-controlled Maroc Telecom bought a majority stake.

With competition between three service providers - Zain (formerly Celtel, now Bharti Airtel), Gabon Telecom's Libertis, and Etisalat's Moov - Gabon became one of the first countries in Africa to exceed 100% mobile market penetration in 2008. A fourth operator, USAN (operated by Bintel under the brand name Azur) entered this virtually saturated market in late 2009. This has accelerated the downward trend in average revenue per user which until recently had remained at remarkably high levels.

In contrast with the mobile market, Gabon's fixed-line and internet/broadband sectors have remained underdeveloped due to a lack of competition and the resulting high prices. The country has sufficient international bandwidth on the SAT-3/WASC/SAFE fibre-optic submarine cable which runs from Portugal via South Africa to the Far East, but this facility has been monopolised by Gabon Telecom. The arrival of new international submarine fibre optic cables in 2011 and 2012 is expected to bring improvements in this sector. However, the licensing of frequency spectrum required to launch third generation (3G) mobile broadband services has been delayed. In the meantime, ISPs are rolling out WiMAX wireless broadband networks and are competing in the fixed-voice market by offering VoIP internet telephony.

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