Skip to main content

Mobile Communications Enables New Growth in Africa

The cellular mobile communications market continues to attract new subscribers within the African continent -- which in turn is helping to fuel regional and local socioeconomic development.

In 3Q-2012, the continent's 54 countries and 1.08 billion people have accumulated 821 million mobile network subscriptions -- that's up 16.9 percent year-on-year, resulting in a cellular subscription penetration of 76.4 percent.

In the first quarter of 2013, it's now forecast that cellular phone penetration will eclipse 80 percent, according to the latest market study by ABI Research.

Given the fact that a significant percentage of prepaid phone users maintain more than one active prepaid mobile subscription to minimize interconnection charges, there is still subscriber growth to be had.

"While Western Europe languishes with barely positive overall growth quarter-on-quarter, Africa managed to generate 4.2 percent growth in the same period," said Marina Lu, research associate at ABI Research.

Subscriptions are still very much dominated by voice communications and text messaging in the form of GSM, with 62.7 percent penetration.

Moreover, 3G subscriptions -- both CDMA2000 and WCDMA -- only represent 11 percent of the overall African market, while 27 percent of the market still relies on 2.5G access technologies for mobile data access.

Given the lack of access to credit card and banking facilities, the vast majority of subscriber's access mobile phone services through prepaid. In South Africa, prepaid ratios for the mobile network operators range from 70 to 86 percent.

But within most other countries on the African continent, prepaid ratios stand at over 95 percent, if not close to 99 percent.

The top seven service providers of the region are:

MTN Nigeria - 43.2 million subscriptions
Vodacom - 37.7 million subscriptions
Vodafone Egypt - 37.5 million subscriptions
MobiNil - 32.4 million subscriptions
MTN South Africa - 23.5 million subscriptions
Etisalat Misr - 22.9 million subscriptions
Glo Mobile - 22.0 million subscriptions

The cellular market in Africa is expected to grow to 1.12 billion by 2017, contributing 13.9 percent to the global cellular market that will rise to to 8.11 billion.

Popular posts from this blog

AI-Driven Data Center Liquid Cooling Demand

The rapid evolution of artificial intelligence (AI) and hyperscale cloud computing is fundamentally reshaping data center infrastructure, and liquid cooling is emerging as an indispensable solution. As traditional air-cooled systems reach their physical limits, the IT industry is under pressure to adopt more efficient thermal management strategies to meet growing demands, while complying with stringent environmental regulations. Liquid Cooling Market Development The latest ABI Research analysis reveals momentum in liquid cooling adoption. Installations are forecast to quadruple between 2023 and 2030. The market will reach $3.7 billion in value by the decade's end, with a CAGR of 22 percent. The urgency behind these numbers becomes clear when examining energy metrics: liquid cooling systems demonstrate 40 percent greater energy efficiency when compared to conventional air-cooling architectures, while simultaneously enabling ~300-500 percent increases in computational density per rac...