African Telcos Lose Over US$25 Billion

The anti-fraud systems provider, Subex Azure has published a report which claims that African telecom operators are estimated to be losing over a quarter of revenues due to revenue leakage, which is double the global average (12.1%). The report conducted by Subex Azure and telecoms analysts Analysys, reveals that the estimated loss across the sample of African operators was 26.8 per cent which is the equivalent to US$25.7 billion.

The main causes of revenue leakage in African operators were identified as internal and external fraud, optimized call routing errors, rating/prepaid charging errors, interconnect/partner payment errors, incomplete/incorrect usage data, and credit management.

Subash Menon, Founder Chairman, Managing Director & CEO, Subex Azure Ltd said: "The African telecommunications market is still in its infancy and deregulation is meaning there is an abundance of new operators and services. Operators need to start putting effective revenue-assurance and fraud-management measures in place in order to protect their revenues and to halt the high levels of loss that they are currently experiencing."

This month, Subex Azure announced it has won a contract to provide fraud management for Safaricom, the Kenyan mobile services provider, and also that it has successfully deployed its fraud management and revenue-assurance systems to MTC Namibia, the leading mobile services provider in Namibia. Subex Azure now has 15 customers in Africa, and is confident of further increasing the company's footprint in the African market in the near future."

Posted to the site on 20th October 2006