Africa Offers Strong Wireless Subscriber Growth Opportunities

Africa, on the whole, has the lowest teledensity rate across the globe, but still offers some strong growth opportunities for telecom operators. Despite the fact that the low penetration of fixed line telephony seems to be the status quo for most of the continent, new research from CIT-PriMetrica has highlighted some key growth opportunities in mobile services and satellite.

CIT-PriMetrica's Yearbook of African Telecommunications identifies Nigeria not surprisingly as the fastest growing mobile market in Africa. With the introduction of GSM, more than a million subscriber lines were deployed within the first year and the growth rate shows little sign of abating. CIT-PriMetrica estimates that there is immediate, un-met demand of at least 3 million more subscribers, with the two private operators, Econet and MTN, engaged in tight competition in the region.

The report also comments that further growth is occurring in Kenya and Nigeria, where the two largest mobile markets in sub-Saharan Africa have just entered an accelerating growth phase. From having been an entirely closed sector in 1999 with less than 24,000 subscriptions, Kenya has seen both the privatization of state-owned operator Safaricom and the issuance of a second mobile license to competitor Kencell within one year."

Posted to the site on 26th February 2003