CDMA Increases in MEA Region - but Still Marginal

Whilst it still accounted for 97.15% of the continental customer base at the end of the year, the importance of GSM technology in the Middle East & Africa region decreased in every quarter of 2006, as customers - particularly in the Middle East - adopted new generation W-CDMA services. In aggregate the two technologies held up better, but there was still a loss of market share as the overall contribution of the GSM family declined from 97.99% to 97.79%.

There were 1.8 million W-CDMA customers in MEA at the end of 2006, compared to just 231k at the end of 2005, which represents an annual growth rate of 676%. When combined with the GSM customer base, however, the rate of increase was just 46.8%. That this is almost the same as the overall growth rate for the continent in 2006 is no coincidence, so minor is the influence of any other technology on the total. It was, however, the wrong side of the regional average (hence the loss of market share) implying that at least one of the other technologies must have gained ground during the year.

CDMA is the only other technology in the MEA region with a customer base of any noteworthy size, and the number of CDMA subscribers grew by 82% in MEA in 2006 to 5.30 million, on the back of strong year on year increases in Angola and Yemen, as well as a major network launch in Sudan during the year. The consequence of the technology's out performance of the average market growth rate was an increased influence on the overall mix, from 1.54% of the total at the end of 2005 to 1.91% a year later.

All of the growth in the CDMA base came from CDMA2000 1x technology, the remaining cdmaOne base being further marginalised from 14.5% to 4.5% of the CDMA total in 2006, as customer numbers fell to below 0.25 million. MEA has four other minority mobile technologies still in operation, the contribution of all of which waned last year. iDEN is the only one of these technologies which will endure for any length of time, and its positive growth rate of 32%, whilst below average, reflects this.

As for the others - NMT, ETACS and AMPS/TDMA - only a handful of customers remained at the end of 2006, making up just 0.08% of the continental total compared to 0.23% a year earlier.

This article was extracted from The Mobile World Briefing, the weekly newsletter from The Mobile World. To download a sample issue of the Briefing in PDF format, please click here. For more information including full subscription pricing, please visit The Mobile World"

Posted to the site on 26th April 2007