Nokia Customising Phones for the Ethiopian Market
Nokia is customising a range of handsets, including some 3G models for the Ethiopian market by adding Ethiopic text capabilities to their phones. BravoCom, the local distributor for Nokia has ordered the handsets following a surge in sales of PrePay SIMS by the monopoly phone operator, Ethiopia Telecommunication Corporation (ETC).
There has also been a sudden surge in demand which has caught the handset distributors off-guard and lead to handset price rises in the retail outlets due to the shortage of phone stocks.
Levi Girma Wake, General Manager and majority share holder of BravoCom told the Capital Ethiopia that the company took advantage of a duty-free zone in neighbouring Djibouti to ship handsets for sale throughout the Horn of Africa countries. "What we have done is to hold the products primarily in Djibouti. And as demand comes from Ethiopia, we ship to Ethiopia or supplement any other country," Levi explained.
Levi used to be Nokia's East Africa Account Manager.
Ethiopian Semitic (also known as Ethiopian, Ethiosemitic, Ethiopic) is a language group which together with Old South Arabian forms the Western branch of the South Semitic languages. Today, the name Ethiopian Semitic languages can be considered a misnomer as the North languages are also found in Eritrea with two of them being exclusively used there; however, the term came into use before Eritrea had separated from Ethiopia.
ZTE recently added 1.2 million GSM lines to the network capacity to cope with demand and also a surge in usage which occurred during the recent celebration of the Ethiopian millennium. A WCDMA overlay is also planed for some parts of the network. There were several serious network failures during the upgrade work, with the mobile operator blaming ZTE for not refarming radio spectrum correctly during the commission of new base stations.
The state owned monopoly ended Q1 '08 with an estimated 1.6 million subscribers, which according to figures from the Mobile World equates to a population penetration level of just 2%.
On the web: Capital Ethiopia - The Mobile World - The Ge'ez or Ethiopic script
Posted to the site on 20th August 2008
