Skip to main content

African telecoms investment - May 2012

$1.1Bn of new investments in African telecoms infrastructure were announced in May 2012. When summed with the $3.1Bn France Telecom (finally) paid for full control of Egyptian mobile operator Mobinil this makes May the most successful month of 2012 for telecoms investment in the continent.

Significant activity includes the launch of Movitel, Mozambique's third mobile operator, to increase competition in this increasingly vibrant east coast market. Movitel has deployed 1,800 BTS to date and intends to double that number by the end of next year. The former gives them capacity for about 7Mn subscribers - more than enough to cope with likely demand in a country of 20Mn people.

Elsewhere, Airtel have commited $100Mn to rolling out 3G in Rwanda over the next three years. Although on the surface this looks like a small amount of money, it should be remembered that Rwanda has a population of roughly 11.5Mn and Airtel's investment should be sufficient to upgrade 1,000 urban cell sites to HSPA+.

Two interesting smaller investments to report:
  • Madnagascan cellco Telma selected Hughes to provide satellite backhaul for its GSM network, demonstrating the continued usefulness of satellite bandwidth for rural telcos
  • Ghanaian ISP Nita has decided to upgrade its Wimax network to LTE, presumably in response to the rapidly falling cost of end user devices for the latter, while penetration of the former technology stagnates. I expect that they will be the first of many to make this switch
Overall, investment for the first five months of the year is up about 70% YoY. Next month I'll do the compare and contrast for the first 6 months of 2012.

Comments

  1. I'm just wondering what your thoughts on these are https://nrcradio.co.uk/walkie-talkies/ are these worth an investment to improve business communications?

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Impacts of a handset leasing model on mobile telcos

Following yesterday's post, here's some related thinking on the impacts on operators of handset leasing. Handset sales represent around 25% of operator revenues in a typical European market, but generate only around 5% of margin. It may therefore be the case that the scenario described would lead operators to a more profitable structural model than exists today. Oil companies are consistently and acceptably profitable, despite being (literally in some cases) the ‘dumb pipe’ that operators are so desperate to avoid becoming. One of the reasons for the oil majors sustained profitability is clear focus on their role in the value chain – to supply the fuel that enables transportation, relying primarily on location, then brand and finally product innovation to compete. BP or Shell do not need to subsidise the purchase of a car in order to drive consumption of fuel because consumers are ‘hooked’ on it (it gets them from place to place) and there are many credible car manufacturers an...

Differences between Industrial and Digital businesses

Since I'm stuck on a Eurostar crawling through western France I thought I'd use the downtime to share this table I've made on the differences between Industrial and Digital companies across the main business functions. A strange insight into how my mind works... but hopeful a useful summary!

Value drivers for telecoms retail

I've been doing a really large number of driver trees recently - we've taken to using them on every project to get really into the guts of value creation for businesses and thus decide where to focus initiative development (How To Win, if you're keeping score). Anyhow, I had to pause for thought recently to work out how to represent the subscription aspect of telecoms retail for a client. Since it took me a minute, I thought I'd share... its lack of elegance suggests that its not quite right, although it was enough to demonstrate that there was a certain lack of coverage in the initiatives that my client was pursuing and thus spark a debate. Enjoy.