West Africa closes in on 14 million lines

Murtala Bakare, Dakar, Senegal
With more than 14 million lines actively connected to some dozens GSM networks in West Africa, analysts at the just ended GSM West Africa conference and exhibition beileve the number of subcribers in the sub-region would reach 39.86 million by December 2005. It is a market optimism
spurred by the fact that less than 10% of the sub-region largely green market for telephony has been explored by the existing networks. Besides, there are high hopes that the return of stability to war ravaged countries such as Sierra Leone, Liberia and Cote D’Ivoire would help drive
fresh investment in GSM networks. About four GSM licences have been issued in the three countries in the last 14 months and there are high expectations that the mobile market would grow faster than had been envisaged in more stable countries such as Gambia, Mali and Niger.

But analysts are tipping Nigeria, Ghana, Senegal and Cote D’Ivoire to lead the 18 other markets in the sub-region to achieve the 40 million mark by next year. Nigeria is closing in on its 10 million mark in less than four years of licensing GSM operation. Ghana, which has an older GSM history has over 1.5 million subcribers from about five GSM operators
including Spacefon,Kasapa Telecom(formerly Celtel Telecom), and Millicom. Senegal with its two mobile operators, Alize and Sentel GSM, is closing in on its first million figure and Cote D’Ivoire coming out of war is expected to record rapid uptake of GSM services. In all, a huge investment potential would translate into bigger networks and stiffer competition in the next few months, say analysts at the three day event. While the networks are bound to grow, there is a still a flip side among other emerging challenges. Raising Funds for GSM Projects would
remain a big challenge for most of the network owners and with the current flow of global FDI to China, India and other Asia countries, unlikely to change, West African mobile operators would have to look inward and develop other strategic means of growing their networks, said Head of African Telecoms Finance at Standard Bank Heloise Smith. One way out as operators such as MTN Nigeria and Mtel have demonstrated is to opt for loan syndication; get the banks to pool resources together to finance expansion projects – Mtel’s facilities syndicated by UBA is yet to materialised owing to Mtel’s own internal problems.

But there are other equally important issues; the networks have matured enough to mutually address increasing cases of handset thefts within national and sub-regional boundaries. In addition, sub-regional agreement ought to have been in existence to encourage pre-paid roaming among operators to enhance the mobile experience of subscribers.


 

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