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Ghana Telecommunications Report Q1 2011
Business Monitor International, Dec 2010, Pages: 78
The Ghana Telecommunications Report provides industry professionals and strategists, corporate analysts, telecommunication associations, government departments and regulatory bodies with independent forecasts and competitive intelligence on Ghana's telecommunications industry.
BMI’s latest update on Ghana’s telecommunications market contains revised forecast figures for the country’s mobile telephony and fixed-line markets. Our new mobile forecast includes September 2010 data as published by Ghana’s leading mobile network operators, including MTN Ghana, part of South Africa’s MTN Group, and Tigo Ghana, owned by Luxembourg’s Millicom International Cellular. In the first nine months of 2010, we calculate that the number of mobile subscribers increased by 5.8%, to reach 16.238mn. This revealed a slowdown compared to the first six months of 2010, which saw a rise of 7.3%, and was due to the net losses reported in Q310 as a result of SIM registration, which was introduced on July 1 2010. There were 237,000 net losses in the quarter. For the year as a whole, we now predict that the market will expand by 5%. This will raise the penetration rate to just over 66% by the end of 2010.
Despite our reservations that there will be slower growth in 2010, MTN, Zain Ghana and Vodafone have all heavily reduced their prepaid tariffs, which should lead to stronger customer growth. While both Zain and Vodafone already offered the market’s lowest tariffs at GHS8 per minute, MTN announced at the end of October 2010 that it was cutting its prepaid tariff in half to undercut the competition and offer it at GHS7 per minute. Furthermore, it is expected that Glo Mobile Ghana will launch mobile services before the end of the year.
After many months of accusations and counter-accusations between the operator and Ghana's Ministry of Environment, Science and Technology (MEST), the Ghanaian president, John Evans Atta Mills, has reportedly intervened with a directive to the minister, Sherry Aryittey, ‘to ensure that Globacom begins full operations in Ghana before the end of 2010’. The president reportedly wants the environment and communications ministries to remove all 'bottlenecks' preventing Globacom from starting full operations. This was disclosed by the Minister for Communications, Haruna Iddrisu, in an interview with local TV station MetroTV in November 2010. According to Iddrisu, most of the issues regarding Globacom's activities have been addressed, except those to do with the erection of telecoms masts, which are yet to be finalised.
Fixed-line figures for August 2010 (latest published regulator data) shows there were 341,292 lines, revealing net additions of 73,903 lines since YE09. The bulk of this growth was driven by the market leader Ghana Telecom (Vodafone) which accounted for 92% of total net additions at 67,958 lines. As for the remaining 5,945 net additional lines in 9M10, this was from the growth of alternative operator Zain.
BMI estimates that fixed line growth during 2010 will be around 34.8% to reach a penetration rate of 1.5%. Over the next five years, we anticipate average annual growth of 9.7% before reaching 569,000 lines at the end of 2015, and a penetration rate of 2.1%.
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